Don't underestimate how powerful silence can be.

I don’t know many organizations seeking help from a public relations agency that are satisfied with the recommendation to shut up. But it is often the best advice — at least for a period of time. Instead, PR firms typically recommend programs designed to increase visibility through ubiquitous communications. They want you out there as often as possible saying as much as possible.

In the meantime, so much exposure risks confusing what you are really all about.

In my view, it is better to pick and choose carefully. Pursue those communications opportunities that support the profile you want to establish and that give you an opportunity to showcase the differentiators that make your organization and/or its products/services special.

What is often lost on the PR community is that silence IS one of the tools of communicators and it can be especially powerful in times of trouble.

This comes to mind after reading the excellent piece on Inc.com by Steve Cody, the managing partner of Peppercom, “Why Nobody is Talking About Your Company.” Cody makes the following point:

I cannot tell you how many CEOs have called me in a panic demanding I develop an immediate statement for a fast-breaking crisis. Not understanding the subtle nuances of image and reputation, many executives—particularly entrepreneurs—believe a thermonuclear response to a product recall or ethics scandal is the only way to go. It isn’t. Not by a long shot. The key to crisis management is understanding the magnitude of the crisis, its potential implications, and the real effect it could have on the organization’s brand. By issuing an immediate response or rebuttal to news, a company may be inadvertently escalating a crisis that would otherwise slip silently under the airwaves.

Obviously, you need to balance the desire to allow things to quietly get back to normal with the benefits of helping to frame the story in order to fairly present the facts — anticipating that a vacuum of information will inevitably be filled by rumors and speculation if you don’t. So if other voices are present, it typically is a good idea to be a part of that discussion. Present the facts, explain how you are responding, express concern for those impacted and vow to participate in the fact finding.

And then let your actions in solving the problem speak for you.

Image: http://diaryofafreewriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/silence-does-not-exist.html

Crisis PR can help to protect an organization or encourage long-term change.

I stumbled upon the story, “PR Students Learn How to Handle Crisis for Clients,” in the Cape May County Herald written by Al Campbell.

I am not 100 percent sure where Cape May County is, but it appears to be in Pennsylvania. Regardless, I think it’s great that their local community college is giving students an opportunity to explore public relations generally and crisis PR specifically.

A few nuggets from the story include:

• It is important to keep the public informed by use of every available means.
• Since Sept. 11, 2001, organizations are more focused on preparedness.
• The most important thing in a crisis is to be able to refer to a plan so you are not scrambling.
• If someone posts inaccurate information about your organization online, instead of engaging that person, it is best to simply post the truth from an official standpoint.
• The first few hours should be considered the “golden hours” when it is essential to deliver the facts that are known in order to minimize baseless rumors and inaccuracies.
• Whenever possible, it is best that a company chief executive should be the source of information in a crisis.

These are all very solid observations and it sounds like a very valuable class for these students.

Of course, in the real world what might seem like common sense can be pushed aside. Human nature is to resist the unwanted scrutiny and hunker down to work to fix whatever is messed up. The role of the crisis PR pro is often to advocate for taking the difficult path in which an organization must  acknowledge problems and mistakes, and begin the often painful process of change.

What this means for the PR practitioners who are reading is that information security must move up your list of potential vulnerabilities. If you have not refreshed your crisis communications plan in the past year or more, please do so and pay special attention to potential IT issues and the impact they can have on your organization’s ability to operate.

I have been trying to keep tabs on Sony’s response to the cyber attack on its Playstation Network over the past several weeks. It appears to have been a very well planned and highly sophisticated assault intended to gather the personal and financial information of subscribers. Something getting attention in the trades but not mentioned much in mainstream media is that the attack was launched using Amazon’s S3 cloud servers, which is important for at least two reasons I can immediately think of: it suggests that cyber criminals will be using cloud computing platforms to launch future attacks and it makes it exceedingly difficult for authorities to track the wrongdoers.

As seems to be the case every time a Japanese company screws up, the Sony team has effectively shrugged its shoulders and said its executives have done a great job responding to the attack. As far as I’ve been able to gather, they have provided zero insight into what specific preventative steps they took prior to the problem to secure their subscribers’ data and they have not offered specifics about what they are doing going forward to make sure data is secure.

In fact, Sony has effectively dismissed the notion that they CAN secure users’ data, which seems pretty amazing for a company that delivers services via the Web. The video below is from the Wall Street Journal with their technology writers discussing the comments from Sony:

As I said at the front, I am by no means a security expert, but I do know that companies can’t just shrug off responsibility because the crooks are too good at what they do. Companies that provide goods and services via the Internet have a responsibility to provide a safe environment in which customers can do business with them. In the absense of that, they should cease to provide services via the Web.

Remember when Firestone (another Japanese company) spent forever telling us that there wasn’t anything they could do about the blowouts that caused SUVs to tumble down highways like bowling balls? It was Ford’s fault. It was the poor pavement used. It was the poor maintenance. It was the overly aggressive drivers. Ultimately, after way too many accidents and deaths, Firestone pulled all their SUV tires and recalled all of the tires already on the road. They finally had the guts to step back, take dramatic and definitive action to ensure a safe customer experience.

That is the difficult decision that Sony is apparently not ready to make.

P.S. to Amazon and other cloud providers: you have Terms of Service for a reason and you better be able to enforce them. Lawsuits related to the Sony debacle are already stacking up and I would have to think the Amazon has liability, no matter how much they insist that they are just providing computing power and nothing else.

Infringe on a trademark? Have a lawyer nearby.

It seems like almost every week I run into some situation involving a trademark.

Today I had a new experience. One of my clients asked me to gather some information about one of their customers. The customer has a product that just so happens to have a name that is identical to the name of the parent company that makes a competitive line of products. Both names are trademarked.

When I raised concerns about having a product with the same name as a competing company, I was told not to worry, since one is a product and the other is a company. That sounded like a load of crap to me.

Could you imagine somebody having the guts to call the hamburger on their menu the McDonald Hamburger? After all, McDonald’s calls their hamburgers all sorts of different names, but none of their PRODUCTS are named McDonald, right? I don’t think McDonald’s would let that fly — in fact they seek to enforce their trademark on “Mc” anything — even if it has nothing to do with food.

Having worked on the crisis / issues management side of several trademark infringement cases — one of which caused a company to have to file for brankruptcy — I am very sensitive to respecting the rights of the first mover. Little guys are very susceptible to getting the shaft when it comes to having a trademark eventually enforced.

Is your business active on Yelp?

A number of my clients have experienced troubling online reviews that can unravel a lifetime of hard work establishing a positive reputation. For anyone who have sacrificed so much to build a business and succeeded against all odds to create jobs and provide essential services that customers gladly pay for, having some nameless, faceless coward go on the attack can rip your heart out.

That’s why I really appreciate the article, “Cosmetic surgeons must manage negative online reviews,” published in the May issue of Cosmetic Surgery Times. It is written for cosmetic surgeons, but it offers valuable guidance that applies to any business. I particularly like this portion in which Dr. Alan J. Bauman explains how important it is to respond to online criticism:

“I’m not saying that you should engage a disgruntled patient in a forum. That’s not appropriate. But I think that you do in some way have to address the issues. You can’t let them fester,” he says. “The most important thing is that physicians have to build their positive images. And they have to put out the good information and encourage their patients to post their good results and talk about their good experiences.”

Public relations and social media consultant Amanda Vega of Amanda Vega Consulting in New York; Dallas; and Scottsdale, Ariz.; says physicians should, in most cases, ignore posts, reviews and comments that have no validity. But they should pay attention in many cases.

For those comments that are constructive, “Respond and an offer to help,” she says.

Responding should be anything but a knee-jerk reaction, according to Babak Zafarnia, president of Praecere Public Relations, Washington. Cosmetic surgeons need to anticipate negative comments and plan for them, he says.

I recently had a client call me upset about seeing a negative review on Citysearch. It was posted by a customer who complained that my client failed to follow-up and was not accessible. He rated him with just one star. To put it in context, this client has dozens of reviews on Citysearch and other online review sites and this was the first that was not a five-star review. So my client was upset.

We talked through it and decided that it would be appropriate to post a response, but I insisted that the tone of the response could not be defensive — it needed to be open and welcoming of the feedback. So we posted a brief response that thanked the negative reviewer for his comments, suggested that we would take the comments into consideration as we constantly seek to improve standards and practices, and urged him to contact us directly so we could get the relationship back on the right track.

I’ve heard others describe online reviews as the equivalent of water cooler conversations. If you overheard a customer saying something negative about you at a cocktail party, you wouldn’t jump in and say they are wrong. You would probably express how sorry you are that they didn’t have an exceptional experience and attempt to learn as much as you could about their complaint. That’s exactly the approach I recommend for those who have negative reviews: try to make it right.

For instance, the Facebook advertising tool tells you there are 6.8 million Texans age 18 and older on Facebook,  1,216,000 are in Houston and 1,080,820 are in Dallas. If you take just the English speakers, the number of Texans goes down to 6.5 million. And then you get to “likes and interests,” where it gets really interesting. I’ve done some work for clients in pet care, so I clicked on “dogs.” There are 27,200 Texans over 18 on Facebook who are interested in dogs, 4,600 of whom are in Dallas. Add “puppies” and the number in Dallas goes up to 6,640.

So instead of creating an ad that goes out to all sorts of people who don’t care about your product or service, you could specifically target people in your town who care deeply about what you have to offer them.

Here is a great presentation from Clara Shih, author, entrepreneur and director, Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy at Salesforce.com, speaking to a class at Stanford University on this topic. I especially appreciated the portion of the presentation that begins at 15:38 in which she describes how someone who attended an earlier talk actually created a Facebook ad specifically targeting just her that only she would be able to see.

So this afternoon I created a Facebook ad for my Media Interview Skills Training service, targeting just people in Texas who have a college degree, are over 25 and are interested in public relations. So just four screens and I was down to a marginally specific population of 4,400 people. But I feel fairly confident that these are the people who would influence the selection of a media trainer. We’ll see how that goes.

Since GoDaddy.com hosts my Web site, I was able to use a $50 credit offered by them for the test, so it is free at least to start with.

But I also wanted to check the laser like capabilities of Facebook advertising. So I created an ad targeting just the 20 people on Facebook who indicated they work at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company, which is one of my clients. The content of the ad is simple — I appreciate the Schipul team and would love it if you became a fan of my company’s Facebook page.

The ability to target the employees of a specific company is remarkable. A few additional screens would make it possible for an IT service provider to specifically target the IT decision makers of each of the companies on their list of prospects. And since the ads are applicable to that specific person or group, they are not considered spam — especially if the content is meaty.

This is very cool stuff and I strongly recommend tinkering around with it. I will let you know what I learn through my trials and anticipate helping clients think through how this can help in their marketing efforts as well.

My wife read the story and the fact that popped out was that the woman was driving a Toyota.

And that is the legacy of Toyota’s ham handed approach to crisis communication over the past six months. If a person is killed driving a Toyota now, at least a part of your brain immediately jumps to the possibility that the car could have contributed to the circumstances leading up to the accident.

How does a person get hit by a train? The accelerator gets stuck? The brakes malfunction? Was she driving a Toyota? Yes. Oh.

Nick Morgan wrote a great piece posted on the Forbes Web site, “Almost Everyone Gets PR Wrong,” in which he details why it does not make sense for a company or individual defend their former positioning once there is a drumbeat of bad news. This runs counter to human nature — we want to fix the problem and return to business as usual. But that is a losing battle.

Morgan suggests that instead companies should change their narrative. Change the way they think of themselves and tell their story. Ultimately, they must change their story because whatever problem they’ve endured has changed the way their communities think of them.

Because our brains retain stories better than any other form of information, we develop shortcuts to handle all the information we need to in the modern world. The most important shortcut is the narrative. The narrative is the quick story that has developed over a long period of time for any organization, company or important public figure. It’s the way we store and organize the information.

Toyota had been the quality car. Volvo is the safety car. BMW is the performance car. Mercedes is the luxury car. Porsche is the sports car.

Now, as it works through the recalls, Toyota appears to want to return to its positioning as the quality car. It won’t work. They need to re-imagine what it is the brand can be, but quality is not it. For many years to come, if a Toyota is involved in a mishap, the public will question whether the car contributed to the wreck. A brand can’t simultaneously be connected with quality AND suspicion.

Instead, Toyota can build upon what it is learning during this period — that it needs to be a customer-focused company. This was Saturn’s original positioning and it was incredibly powerful. But over time, Saturn was folded into the GM umbrella and lost what made it special in the mid 90s. Today, the position has been abandoned with the death of the Saturn brand. For the most part, Toyota drivers love their cars and have rallied in defense of the brand. Their positive experiences with their local dealerships handling the recall have amplified their positive feelings. There is already a community there.

Toyota will only prolong its problems if it seeks to defend its former positioning as a quality car. It must move on and embrace a new narrative. Other companies that have found themselves in similar straits have learned that taking decisive action to change propelled them on a positive course and punctuated the end of their crises.

Mike, at what point does “plausible” become likely? Plausible means conceivable, possible, it could be the case.

In fact, according to Dictionary.com,  the definition of plausible is, “Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse.” But an alternate meaning is, “Giving a deceptive impression of truth or reliability.” So does that really make you think “likely” means the same as “plausible?” I don’t think so. It goes onto say, “The person or thing that is plausible strikes the superficial judgment favorably; it may or may not be true: a plausible argument (one that cannot be verified or believed in entirely).”

I think the Star-Telegram really blew it with that lead. Hopefully, nobody read beyond the headline.

Disclosure: No client relationships, but like everyone in North Texas, I own property in the Barnett Shale.

This presentation from comScore makes the case that you shouldn’t be fixated on large audiences. For many organizations, if the video is viewed by a few DOZEN people, that may be great — if it is the right dozen people.

The webinar was presented by  Tania Yuki, comScore’s online video industry expert.

September 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service showed that more than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Online video viewing continued to reach record levels in September with nearly 26 billion videos viewed during the month.

The title was “Dramatically Increase Productivity by Slaying the E-mail Monster,” by Michael Valentine and Lynn Coffman, the principals of Coffman Valentine & Associates.

The basic takeaway is that the typical knowledge worker (read: everyone in PR) treats e-mail differently than any other information that they deal with. When the mail comes, you might quickly look through it to see if there is a check, an invoice or something urgent that needs attention. If not, you don’t open the mail and read it all. You set it aside and deal with it later. If someone adds a file to your the inbox on your desk (okay, confession: my entire desk serves as a giant in-box), you don’t lunge to see what’s in the file and breathlessly respond to each item. You work through the inbox by prioritizing the items. Some you file while others you delegate.

For some reason, e-mail is different. We feel a compulsion to have to open them immediately and respond as if the world would end if a minute passed. And then we keep the e-mail as a memento. Okay, it isn’t just a memento — it can serve as a reminder or proof or just help us find the sender’s e-mail address. Another confession: I currently have about 3,500 e-mails in my inbox. I use my e-mail inbox as a repository of everything from good ideas to things I need to follow up on.

No more. After the Coffman Valentine session at PRSA ’09, I am now working with a different process. They teach knowledge workers the four “A”s: Axe, Act, Allocate and Assign. You need to delete the stuff that has no value (Axe), take immediate action to deal with the stuff that require just a couple minutes of time to review or respond (Act), set aside specific time to work through those items that require more than a few minutes (Allocate) and look for things that can be taken off your plate and delegated (Assign). Here is how I am using it:

1. I no longer keep my Outlook on all the time. I have two computer screens on my desktop and my standard process for years and years has been to have Outlook open on my right screen. Not anymore. I close Outlook after working through my e-mails now.

2. I process all incoming e-mails and leave my inbox empty when I’m done. I have established files for each client (duh) and move the e-mails there.

3. As an adjunct to step 2, I have established a better filing system for e-mails. If an e-mail requires action (the development of a news release or drafting of an article) I file it either in my “action” file or I drag it to my calendar to schedule a specific time block to deal with it. I did not even know this was possible. Just drag your e-mail to your calendar and a calendar box will pop up that gives you the ability to set a date and time for a reminder. That is a game changer. It is also still a work in process. I have not fully adopted this step yet.

4. I am being more careful about the outgoing e-mails I send. Coffman Valentine made a point that e-mails beget more e-mails. There is a 60% boomerang effect, which means for every 10 e-mails you send, you can expect to get six back. But consider each e-mail you send goes to four people — that means you can expect to receive 24 e-mails back for every 10 you send. Consider the other ways you can deliver your message. Heck, pick up that funny looking thing you hold to your ear — the telephone! If you reduce the e-mails you send, you will reduce the e-mails you receive. Brilliant!

5. I am being more clear and specific in the subject lines of the e-mails I send. A lot of e-mail traffic is spent clarifying or correcting poor communication. You send an e-mail and the person who gets it goes charging off in the wrong direction because they thought you were saying one thing when you really intended another. Clear and specific subject lines can prevent a lot of that back and forth.

So if you were wondering why I haven’t sent you an e-mail in a while, it is because I am trying to break my e-mail addiction. In recent days I have been curled up like a junkie shaking and sweating while wonder if I have e-mail in my in-box, but I am making strides. I am taking it one day at a time.

Alos: Henry Devries, APR, who moderated the session has posted some of the basics at the ComPRehension blog: http://comprehension.prsa.org/?p=980. They also had a CD that they were handing out that makes for a good 60-minute podcast, but I don’t see it posted anywhere online.