COMM230W:

Lesson 2 Overview

Introduction

If you work in the strategic communications office for an airline, you can predict some of the most serious problems you and your colleagues may be called upon to help solve or address. You should have a very well-developed playbook ready day or night to address a deadly crash. You can anticipate that there are going to be stories prompted by passengers being grounded on a tarmac somewhere for hours on end, flights delayed because of mechanical problems, passenger injuries because of turbulence, and complaints about the cost of flying increasing and the space between the seats decreasing. Employee strikes will, sooner or later, ground planes and your customers.

Similarly, if you work in public relations for a cruise line, there must be tried-and-true protocols spelled out in great detail for use when hundreds of passengers get a stomach bug on board one of your ships, or a passenger goes missing and is presumed lost overboard at sea in the middle of the night. Or perhaps the engines of your biggest ships go dead in the water along with vacation plans for several thousand passengers. In the cruise industry, the communications staff expects hurricanes, shipboard fires and maybe even armed pirates.

If you manage communications for a politician in Washington, you expect attacks from those who support a different political party. A large police department in a major city will, of course, sooner or later come under scrutiny and perhaps protests from the public concerning the treatment of a suspect. Or it may have to deal with the crushing aftermath of the shooting death of one of its own officers.

One of the most important parts of dealing with a crisis or a communications challenge is preparing for it in advance. You may not know the specifics, but certain businesses, careers or initiatives lend themselves to some predictability.

For example, working in higher education at a large university, you know there will be student drinking problems, faculty inviting controversial speakers to campus, cases of hazing, tuition increases, student athlete violations and inappropriate costumes at Halloween parties. The date and the details are not usually known in advance, but the administration has an opportunity to think about these issues before they occur, and the public relations or strategic communications staff can lead those conversations.

Objectives

Here are the objectives for this lesson:

• Analyze your client’s, firm’s, organization’s or institution’s situation for potential challenges and opportunities.
• Identify circumstances that may leave your organization most vulnerable.
• Develop response plans that will serve as a road map should a challenge suddenly emerge.
• Illustrate how resources can be put in place to take advantage of opportunities that can enhance your organization’s reputation, increase sales or build public support.

Readings & Activities

By the end of this lesson, make sure you have started to become familiar with the websites listed for this section and completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 2 Course Schedule.

Offense and Defense

Unlike in football, in which a player is assigned to play offense or defense, in the profession of public relations and strategic communications, typically part of your work is offense and part of it is defense. You may be intensely focused on one or the other for extended periods of time, or you may be in a situation where you need to be doing both simultaneously.

Sometimes you are focused on helping your client generate sales (for instance, if you work for Ford Motor Company or Apple Computers), build friends and supporters (if you work for The Penn State Alumni Association or United Way). Everything may be going well. You are part of a bigger team. You are selling a reliable product that people want to buy, or promoting a good cause many people support.

Other times you may need to interpret complex information (such as a new, experimental treatment for cancer) or announce controversial information (such as a celebrity’s decision to raze an historic building that blocks the view of the ocean from his new multimillion-dollar home).

Sometimes you are focused on damage control — perhaps hired in the middle of the night to help a movie actor say and do the right things in the wake of a 3 a.m. drunk driving accident and arrest.

Many of the same qualities will make you valuable in all of the above scenarios. In a crisis, a good writer who can turn out a statement or story in minutes, not hours, is important. Someone with strong communications skills either in front of a reporter or group of reporters is helpful. Being well connected to the news and social media who may cover a story is very valuable. A journalist you work with on an ongoing basis is more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt when you are working with them on a difficult story angle.

You need to be viewed by the press, and by extension the public, as someone who is honest, reliable and available when needed.

A strategic communicator does much more than write or act as public spokesperson. Your service to the celebrity planning to wreck a 150-year-old building might not be some good quotes but rather some good advice. Your best approach may be to convince the celebrity not to rip down the building. Advise him to work with a local historical group to have it moved to another location where it can be open to everyone, not hidden and decaying on private property. Public relations is much more than writing and speaking. It involves looking at things differently than everyone else involved in a project. Good public relations involves understanding everyone’s position before taking  action.

Around the Management Table

A company’s vice president for finance will bring one narrow perspective to the table: How do we build a safer car and still leave room for a fair profit for the company at the price at which we plan to sell it?

The firm’s legal team has another perspective: How do we keep company officials out of jail and prevent expensive lawsuits?

The human resources department and the company union will have two other points of view.

The marketing/advertising department will be focused on this month’s sales.

The CEO and president may be worried about pleasing the board of directors and stockholders.

It is the public relations staff who can bring the broadest perspective to the boardroom table where really important decisions are made. If you work in a public relations office at a large company or nonprofit, it is important to be familiar with a little bit of every single part of the organization. Sooner or later you are going to need to work with all of the people at the table and understand how all the various parts fit together for the good of the organization.

Preparing for the Negative and Positive

If your legal team wins a lawsuit that was brought against the company in civil court but your company’s sales plummet because the public is outraged over  its perceptions of the company’s actions, then you lose the case in the court of public opinion. That can be just as damaging as a multimillion-dollar civil court loss.

Hopefully, most of the situations you prepare for in advance, at least those that are negative, do not ever happen. That doesn’t mean you are wasting time preparing for the unlikely. Those unlikely scenarios have tripped up more than one organization.

And not all communications challenges are negative. If you work in public relations at a university with world-class faculty, you know there will be opportunities to take advantage of good news and promote it better and further than it might travel on its own.

If you are on the communications team promoting a candidate for office and know he or she is a military veteran, you can take advantage of news media looking for angles to cover on Veteran’s Day. This may be especially true if your opponent in the race is not a veteran. Or if your candidate has a strong platform position on helping people find jobs in a bad economy, you might target a related announcement on the day new employment figures are released by the federal government. And it is an Election Day staple for television news cameras to cover a candidate and the candidate’s spouse and children going to the polls early in the day to cast their ballots. Free, last minute publicity on television news stations for the rest of Election Day is an opportunity no candidate should pass up.

Good advance planning can help you identify positive news opportunities like those mentioned above and then make the most of them.

Multiple Vantage Points

As part of your analysis of dangers and opportunities, consider getting input from these vantage points to understand what they think of your company, organization, or celebrity client: 

• people doing similar work in your area of business;
• key company or organization officials (to see where they think opportunities and vulnerabilities exist);
• your customers, suppliers and employees;
• your competitors (especially for their perceptions of your strengths and weaknesses);
• the professional news media and smartphone-toting amateur social media observers;
• key donors if you work for a nonprofit (to determine what they think of your operations and goals; and
• volunteers if your organization depends on them (to determine how committed they are and whether they plan to stay engaged and remain supportive).

We live in a huge social media world in which there are never enough good strategic communicators. With a billion people feeding comments, photos and videos on to Facebook pages night and day, there has never been a greater need for good communications advice. Add to that the hundreds of millions of Twitter users; others posting information to YouTube, Vine, Vimeo, Tumblr and Flickr; thousands of bloggers; and scores of other popular social media platforms that rate professionals, businesses, hotels and airlines, and it is easy to understand how important quick, accurate and responsible communications can be to keep a reputation in good shape.

Let’s assume you work for a company that understands the importance of expecting the unexpected. Let’s also assume you and your team know how to develop the framework for good communications decision making.

An Action Plan

Here are some guardrails to put around your plan of action:

• Be honest.
• Be truthful.
• Act quickly.
• Don’t speculate.
• Put yourself in the shoes of your unhappy customers, voters, donors, volunteers or fans.
• Act with humility.
• Resist the urge to blame the victim.
• Understand that sometimes life is unfair, and social media may not be accurate.

It is important to build public trust and loyalty when things are good. People will hang in with you longer if doubts start to surface later. They will be more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.

You should have several immediate goals:

• Don’t harm your company or organization’s long-term reputation.
• Don’t expose your company or organization legally or criminally.
• Build goodwill, support, donors, volunteers, users and customers.

Challenges, problems and even a crisis situation can in some instances actually result in more support from the public, not less. When people watch how a company, nonprofit agency or celebrity responds to allegations, product or service failures or criminal charges, it is an opportunity to set the record straight — and perhaps even strengthen support.

The War Room

As you collect input from a broad range of sources, you can begin to assess what kind of shape your company, client or nonprofit agency is in. You will see the areas where more communications resources might need to be directed, and you can better understand the qualities that make people want to buy its products or volunteer to support its cause.

With the rapid growth in the role social media is taking on, a number of major companies are starting to launch something often called a “war room.” The idea is to put your best social media people in a large room with the right resources to monitor the company’s reputation every second of the day or night.

For decades PR offices at corporations, nonprofits and in higher education have tried to promote their organizations in the news media and then followed up by collecting newspaper and video clips to measure their success. Now the clipping packages can be pulled together by companies that specialize in this work, or they can be produced in-house using free or paid search engines and services.

The war room idea is the same concept, only on Red Bull. Daily updates are not enough. A minute-by-minute understanding of how people view your company, organization or brand is imperative when social media can go viral around the world in seconds.

And updates themselves are not enough. The organization needs to be ready to step in and guide conversations, correct misperceptions and answer questions posed in front of hundreds of other readers that in the past might have just gone unanswered. Instead of once a day looking at what people say about you, it is now important to be engaged in real time with what people are saying.

Instead of simply monitoring what the New York Times or CBS News is reporting about your company or organization, the billion-plus amateur reporters in the social media era must also be followed. It is now important to monitor what John in Hoboken is telling friends online about your company’s mustard, or what Trish in Spokane says about her school’s football team or just what Rene in Tucson thinks about that new model of Ford Mustang.

Calling these social media centers war rooms is likely meant to instill a sense of urgency and importance to this growing area within strategic communications and public relations. Perhaps a more accurate name for the endeavor and its ultimate mission would be to call it the peace room.

And instead of simply tasking your PR team with preparing a daily media analysis, this initiative involves company marketing staff and legal representatives to help broaden the two-way engagement that is possible on a good day and necessary when challenges arise. This is where the old-fashioned customer call-in telephone number and the employee suggestion box meet everyone else on the company or organization’s management team.

These people and the tools at their disposal are in place to help you keep the peace and to keep customers happy, loyal, supportive and ready to buy more of your product in the future. It can serve as the intersection where the goals, values and product of a company or organization can meet consumers, users and supporters’ expectations and needs head-on.

The Holding Statement

We talked at the start of this lesson about the need for public relations staff in various professions to have a playbook or certain kinds of material ready to use that relates specifically to their line of work, from the cruise industry to airlines to higher education.

Sometimes, if a very specific event, opportunity or challenge is likely, the communications staff is tasked in advance with developing a holding statement. Other times it is developed on the spot because of a specific problem that had just occurred or is still occurring. If the communications team for our gubernatorial candidate is aware that Barry Simpson once had an extramarital affair that has never been made public, they may want to have a holding statement ready in the event that one day on the campaign trail the issue is revealed. If they know he was arrested for driving while intoxicated as a 17-year-old, and his record was subsequently wiped clean, they should have a statement ready. The arresting officer in that incident two decades earlier may have a long memory and may favor one of the candidates your candidate is trying to beat.

A holding statement can be pulled out of the PR playbook on a moment’s notice as a negative story spreads like wildfire on social media and as journalists start calling asking for comment. By preparing it in advance, it can be vetted for accuracy. It can be presented calmly and with humility.

Some organizations want to go too far by creating  holding statements for every possible scenario that go into great detail, and these  may not sound quite right in the glare of a sudden real-world scenario that may have different dynamics than those hypothetical situations that were planned for in advance.

SWOT

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Different versions of the SWOT analysis have been around for decades. It often appears in the form of a simple matrix and allows a marketing or public relations team to look at their client or their client's competitors in a simple graphic form to help decide where resources may be most needed and most effective.