In the days following the mishap, company spokespersons sought to alleviate the concerns of those who had been scheduled to go on a future cruise of the Costa Concordia. For those who no longer wanted to go on a future cruise, the company offered a full refund. For those who did want to continue with their plans for a cruise, they offered a 30 percent discount.

Somehow this ended up getting all mixed up and it created unnecessary challenges for crisis communications responders.

A report, “Costa Concordia: ‘insulting’ cruise offer to survivors,” in The Telegraph included the following quote from an unnamed Costa Cruise spokesperson:

“The company is trying to do everything they can for those passengers directly affected.

“The company is not only going to refund everybody but they will offer a 30 per cent discount on future cruises if they want to stay loyal to the company.”

Based on how the two quotes were presented, it is evident that they were probably not a single thought or back-to-back sentences when delivered, but they were published that way — creating the impression that the company was offering the victims of the accident a 30 percent discount on a future cruise. It apparently was confusing enough that the person responsible for writing the summary of the article wrote:

“The owners of the Costa Concordia are offering survivors of the disaster a 30 per cent discount off future cruises as they battle to stave off law suits expected to cost hundreds of millions of pounds.”

Needless to say, the suggestion that the victims of the cruise ship disaster were being offered a discount off a future cruise further damaged the company’s reputation and created another distraction for crisis communications responders. The story spread everywhere in a matter of hours and, despite the efforts of the crisis team to clarify that the offer was not for the victims of the disaster but for their customers who were inconvenienced by it, the vast majority of inaccurate and outraged reports have not been corrected.

One publication that has tried to correct the record is TIME. Like just about everyone else, it originally offered an account of the report from The Telegraph on January 23rd, but has since required updating not once but twice. On January 24th, TIME posted an update to the story that linked to an article in the Miami Herald, “Carnival Cruise Lines faces a hostile PR tide,” which reported:

“It’s unclear if the offer was actually floated…Costa briefly refuted the stories, then retracted the denial — the latest flashpoint in a public-relations response that has both Costa and Carnival’s Doral headquarters under fire.”

Then on January 25th, TIME posted another update to the story, which now has the headline, “Costa Cruises Denies Giving Cruise to Concordia Survivors.” The latest update includes a statement from Costa Cruises (note: the emphasis is mine):

“With reference to news reports on discounts and promotional offers, Costa Cruises feels bound to point out that the company has never offered any discount on future cruises to guests who were on board the Costa Concordia for the cruise of January 13th and involved in the tragic accident. The information published by a newspaper and reported in various news outlets is totally unfounded, as is confirmed by the English passenger who was quoted by the newspaper.”

Okay, now I think we’re all on the same page. It is a great illustration of why exactness of speech — specificity of language — is so important in a crisis. What in other circumstances would be a subtle or even humorous misunderstanding can extend the life-cycle of a crisis or even turn into a full blown crisis of its own. The lesson is to be mindful of how every word, phrase, sentence and image could be interpreted and take appropriate action to be as exact as possible in the language used to minimize the likelihood of further damage.

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.

Salmon Khan photo by Robyn Twomey

Last night after watching the final Oprah show (at least until the end of her non-compete with her syndicator, which ends in 2012), I read a terrific profile in BusinessWeek about Salmon Khan, “Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math,” which seemed to me to be the perfect subject for Oprah. It is a great story about a revolution that is underway in how to teach in the 21st Century — and how to utilize some of the capabilities of technology in the classroom.

I won’t get into all the specifics — I encourage you to read the article — but basically Khan accidentally created a nonprofit that makes short 10-minute lessons available for free online. After a few years of working on it, there are 2,500 or so lessons that have been viewed a combined 52 million times. Some forward-thinking schools are now integrating the lessons into their classes and are seeing amazing results. One school told BusinessWeek that test scores increased an average of 70 percent.

But what I like the most was the description of one teacher who had “flipped the classroom.” Instead of sending the kids home to do the work and coming to school for the lecture, they are having the students consume the lecture at home and then come into class to do the work. What a concept! It gives the teacher the ability to participate and intervene as the students work on solutions. It is so much more aligned with how the world really works!

In the video below, Khan goes into more detail about flipping the classroom. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have the U.S. classroom better reflect how the work world and the world in general really operate. I am very concerned that our schools are not preparing students for the type of environment they will have to navigate when they graduate.

We don’t passively listen as someone commands. That is a 1950s mentality. We participate. We work in teams — usually dispersed geographically. We share and collaborate. The nature of the work is no longer hierarchical as it was less than a decade ago — ideas come from everywhere. Our schools must reflect these changes.

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.

My favorite Bruce Springsteen story is from that Red Rocks show when Bruce was on tour supporting The River. How cool is the age we are living in when you can type “Springsteen Red Rocks 1981″ into Google and you can find out the show was on August 16, 1981 and even get the set list from the show?

It was festival seating, so my buddy, Chris Buck and I went early in the morning to get great seats — right in the middle about 15 rows back. So we are bored stiff come mid-afternoon. It would have been a good idea to bring something to do, but we brought nothing. And then it starts to rain.

You gotta be kidding me!

But, just as I was beginning to come to grips with what a disaster this afternoon was going to be, out onto the stage comes the ENTIRE band completely unannounced. They just come walking out for a sound check.

First song — Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

If we had smartphones and knew how to text in 1981, we would be texting everyone we knew. It was fantastic. Screw the sound check, they sounded great. Chris shot a photo that he gave me for Christmas that year (seeing a continuous theme of Bruce for Christmas? LOL) and I still have it somewhere.

So as I was starting to watch this Houston house cut bootleg DVD I was just incredibly jealous that those at the Houston show had the surprise of having their show captured on video for all time. How great is that? Here’s what the Houston Chronicle wrote a few months ago:

The key carrot for many locals will be the inclusion of Thrill Hill Vault Houston ‘ 78 Bootleg: House Cut, a concert recording from The Summit on Dec. 8, 1978.

Let’s get one very faint quibble out of the way first. Today’s standards for filming a concert differ greatly from those in 1978, so the multicamera film lacks some of the visual pop we’ve come to expect. There are moments when the lights go down that the screen goes completely black. Quibble concluded, as it really doesn’t matter because this concert was volcanic.

Obviously nothing could compare to being there, but those in attendance are likely to be goosed seeing Springsteen and the E Street Band slashing through these 26 songs again (it seems some between-song footage has been excised as the DVD’s three hours runs much shorter than the four-plus-hour estimates fans have recalled). There’s little point in singling out songs because the performance was relentlessly frenzied (though Streets of Fire is fittingly incendiary). Was the show better than others from the tour? Who knows, but it’s an awesome marriage of brawn and brain in a single rock concert.

Dale Adamson’s Chronicle review is reprinted inside the spiral notebook that houses the set. Proof that faster isn’t necessarily better in this line of work, the poor guy had to split nine songs early to file his story. So he caught a great Because the Night and missed Backstreets, Rosalita, Tenth Avenue Freeze Out and Born to Run, among others. (Imagine trying to summarize a baseball game after six innings.)

Okay, enough with the whining about the production quality. Everyone now is more accustomed to watching videos shot on cell phones, so I think they’ll be able to get over the crappy lighting.

Anyway, one of the pearls that Dale Adamson pointed out in his original 1978 review of the show was Because the Night. Check it…

The documentary that accompanies the box set tells a great story about this song. During the recording of Darkness on the Edge of Town, engineer/producer Jimmy Iovine (now of American Idol fame) was splitting time between Bruce and the Patti Smith Group, which was working on Easter in the studio next door. When Bruce decided it didn’t fit on his album, Iovine gave Smith a tape of the song. She recast it, and it was included on Easter, becoming the first single release from that album. I’m not sure what came first, Patti Smith’s release of the song or the Houston show.

Looking forward to seeing Bruce when he tours again. In the meantime, I have lots more to dig into in this box set.

Now that disclosure is complete, I have a simple question resulting from today’s Groupon deal for Dallas/Fort Worth. For $8 you can purchase a shampoo and haircut at Great Clips. Great deal — unless you consider that Great Clips has an ongoing and very aggressive coupon strategy. A few times each month I can expect to receive a coupon for Great Clips in the mail, ranging from $7 to $9 for a haircut.

So why would someone (as of this moment Groupon is reporting 1,600 people have purchased) pay up front to basically get the same deal they would otherwise receive in the mail?

Interesting psychology at play, I suspect. The sense of urgency, which is amplified by the ticking clock that shows how much time is left down to the second, is clearly a factor. The sense of “it has to be a great deal or everyone else wouldn’t be doing it” also contributes, I suppose.

I’d love to hear from the marketers who have insight into what prompts a person’s buying decision in these situations. All the factors seem to align closely with what you see on the TV shopping channels. Great image, sense of value, urgency, etc.

A few weeks ago I was excited to purchase a $25 certificate to Humperdink’s for $10. I was especially excited about the prospect of going to the Humperdink’s in Arlington before a Ranger’s game. That thought is what prompted me to click and buy.

But then the following day I saw a coupon in the Dallas Morning News for a free entree with the purchase of an entree at Humperdink’s. So I shelled out money upfront for what amounted to the same deal I could get without paying anything. Doh!

If you don’t consider the time value of money, I don’t suppose that’s such a big deal, but the fact that consumers are being asked to fork over their dough for the promise of something in the future is significant. That money that you are spending with only a certificate in return is gone. All the other things you could have done with that money between the time you spend it and use the certificate are also gone. That is your opportunity cost.

Okay, before I get into a big economics discussion, I’ll wrap this up.

From now on, I only check Groupon for deals I never see anywhere else. I recently bought a Groupon for Feedstore Bar B Que, which is a terrific tiny local place in Southlake that never advertises. Perfect. But no more paying up front for deals I can get for free.

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.

So in Howard’s absence, I offer this video that has never been more appropriate than this coming Monday.

I won’t be among the many who bash Howard for taking additional time off. He is the best thing on radio and should do whatever he feels will make it possible to keep delivering great entertainment. Three days of the Stern show each week is better than a year’s worth of any other show currently on radio.

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.