Dilbert on Public Relations
BP's oil spill non-response
The current disaster in the Gulf states, with the BP oil spill (you know it’s bad when a disaster is named after your company) shows the importance of incorporating social media in your crisis communications plan, and the importance that social media plays in your communication strategy.
For the past month, millions of gallons of oil have been flooding into the Gulf as an oil drilling rig, owned by Transocean Ltd on behalf of bp plc, exploded, killed eleven crew members, and is now threatening the coasts of Louisiana, Mississipi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida.
Ultimately, while BP is in a horrible position, how they respond matters. And the appropriate response today is far different than what was accepted just a few years ago. Today, social media is part of the story – and you don’t control the message.
One of the core issues today is that people demand transparency and immediate news. Social and online media can provide it. According to Ellen Rossano, who used to be the Coast Guard’s public information officer during the Exxon Valdez oil spill:
“I advise my clients that they have to get the truth out as quickly as possible. One of my common-sense rules is you just can’t lie about what’s going on,” she told me. “You’re going to be found out. You can’t say ‘no comment’ anymore. It implies guilt. It implies you’re hiding something. You can always say to the media and the public, ‘Here’s what I can tell you.'”
She also notes:
“I’m thrilled beyond imagining at how the Joint Information Center has been transparent,” she says. “They’re posting situation reports everyday; there’s not much more they could be doing to be transparent, and I think that’s a phenomenal shift. The fact that anybody from the media and public can go to the sites and download video and audio … it’s just a huge improvement.”
Of course, you can’t always control the message. For example, Facebook recently introduced “community pages” which aggregates discussion about a specific topic. One of the important things for companies to be aware of, is that marketers do not control it. For example, bp’s community page has a lot of negative conversation about the bp oil spill.
bp plc’s Facebook presence is hard to find (I only found it by tweeting their account and asking for it), which means that they aren’t being heard or responding to the litany of complaints. Their Facebook page only has 741 fans. Hence, when someone goes on Facebook and looks for info on bp, instead of an official bp statement, they are more likely to find a group like this:
In fact, on Twitter, someone has created a fake account (@BPGlobalPR) with over 37,000 followers, compared to bp America’s real account (@BP_America) with under 6,000.
Toyota: Example of a Crisis Communications Fail
Toyota’s recent failures and poor press is a example of how crisis communication in 2010 must embrace the cultural changes taking place.
When speaking to clients, the most important thing that I try to explain is that social media and the Internet is not about technology – it’s not about Twitter or Facebook or blogging or Flickr. Rather, it’s about transparency.
The recent worldwide Toyota recall was a major communications disaster for Toyota precisely because they forgot that one essential point — transparency.
Since 2002, Toyota warned auto dealerships of problems in the Toyota Camry. While the company later claimed that their problems were due to stuck floor mats, the earlier documents referred to the problem as electrical.
FAILURE #1: Changing their story and covering up. While cover ups (while unethical) may have worked in an age where information was hard to come by, in today’s age of legal and digital transparency, any cover up will be discovered in short time.”They can fix these problems easily,” said Tim Howard, a Northeastern University law professor who heads the legal group suing Toyota. “But it would cost them about $500 a car nationwide. If you have six [million] to seven million cars, you add the numbers — it’s between $4 [billion] and $5 billion. It’s hard to actually tell the truth when those numbers are at the bottom of that truth.” (CNN)
But the problem continued. Five years later, in 2007, over 55,000 Camry’s were recalled. And two years after that, Toyota’s image was significantly tarnished with millions of their vehicles recalled. Backtracking on their 2002 story, the auto company recalled thousands of floor mats in 2007 and 2009. Yet, while Toyota blamed the floor mats in their November 2009 recall letter, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that Toyota’s letter was “inaccurate and misleading” and that, “removal of the floor mats is simply an interim measure, not a remedy of the underlying defect in the vehicles.
When Toyota’s CEO was called in from Japan to testify in front of a Congressional testimony, he was also criticized for evading the congressmen’s answers.
Had Toyota been transparent, the problem could have been resolved with far less negative press, without Congressional sanction, and without the decline in sales.t was estimated that each Toyota dealership in the US could lose between $1.75 million to $2 million a month in revenue, a total loss of $2.47 billion across the country from the entire incident. Additionally, Toyota Motors as a whole announced that it could face losses totaling as much as $2 billion from lost output and sales worldwide. Between 25 January and 29 January 2010 Toyota shares fell in value by 15%. Competitors began offering incentives for Toyota owners to trade in their cars and purchase competitors.
Toyota has not done an adequate job of engaging with their customers online. Toyota’s European Twitter account has less than 2,100 followers and only tweets sporadically. The same is true with their Canadian account.
Toyota is slowly reversing these concerns by starting to address their safety concerns via their other social network profiles. For example, the background of Toyota USA’s Twitter account (@toyota) now includes a link to the recall site and they are tweeting out the official statements. The company should, however, empower their community ambassadors (those tweeting under the brand’s name) to speak about the problems Toyota is facing.
Beyond a link, their Facebook account does not reference the crisis in a professional manner. After Akio Toyoda’s forced Congressional testimony, the company began to address the crisis by hoping that readers would demand less information. In fact, readers are demanding more recall information.
If your product is due for a recall, here are some steps that you can take:
- Plan Ahead – Businesses should have a recall emergency plan. They should also consider purchasing recall insurace.
- Be Transparent – Transparency will win you a lot of goodwill. One company noticed potential problems and voluntarily contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission and then, when faced with a product recall, was told by the CPSC that it didn’t need to make its recall public, but the CEO did it anyway. The result? The company was able to rebound.
- Respond on Your Marketing Channels. This means not merely sending out a press release over the wires but also a response (and preferably a personal response, not simply copying your release) over your company’s blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, microblogging account, and other social networks that you may be on.
Reputation Management & The Digital Age
Negative reputation management and crisis communications has always been important components of strategic communications. With the recent rise of user-generated content, however, the tactics to deal with these important communication challenges have changed.
A recent eMarketer post asks the question “how can you use social media to fix campaigns that don’t click with your targets?” How can you react to negative comments about your brand?
As the graph demonstrates, while direct engagement is still the most popular option (although this could be over the phone, e-mail, SMS, social networking sites, or other channels), other important methods to control your reputation online are also popular.
33% of respondents chose to take this negative feedback by improving their product or service. This is one of the tremendous underreported benefits of social media and online marketing. Social media channels provide a cheap way to engage in consumer research and brand monitoring, helping product creators understand usability and what customers want.
24% encourage others to speak more positively. This ties in with the 12% that create content to try to push content down on the search engines. The best response to a negative comment on Amazon.com, Yelp, TripAdvisor, or other user-generated review site is often a real, honest positive review.
17% issued and distributed press releases or comments to address issues. This also can tie in with the 12% that create content to push negative results down search engines as online press release services can be very useful SEO tools.
14% attempted to get the negative comment removed by the publisher or blogger. Unless the content was blatantly false, this is probably the least effective manner as most publishers would not be likely to remove their content. But there are occasions in which it is appropriate.
12% engaged in SEO – Search Engine Optimization – as part of their reputation management plan – and tried to push the offending content down in the search engines. People today search for information via search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Thus, if you can push negative information down, via search engine optimization strategies, than this can be an effective way to control how your brand is viewed. This is one of the newer options in the crisis communication and reputation management toolkit.
What do you do? How do you handle negative online comments about your brand? What do you think of these responses?