media training with executives
Toby: Yes, just echoing that. I mean when we do media training with executives now who might be out speaking about an incident, we tell them exactly as Tom says, to talk about the response, what’s happening, not about what happened. I mean what’s happened, we’ll find out what’s happened, there’ll be some sort of investigation or there’ll be some sort of inquiry, you know (TC 00.10.00), we will do everything we can at some point to find out exactly what happened. But that’s not going to happen on day one, you know, there may be people who say they know what’s happened but it won’t be clear that anybody does know what actually happened. So, it’s much more important to talk about what’s happening, in other words what we’re doing in the response that we’re taking. So, what we’re taking responsibility for is the response immediately and that’s the most important thing, and the be very humble about that.
Moderator: Okay. Talking about the leaders, how important do you think it is for the organisation to have a face, i.e. someone talking rather than just issuing statements. Like getting Bob Dudley to issue them rather than a statement from the press office, him talking directly for example.
Toby: Yes, you can, I mean it’s interesting, we’re noticing a slight change now in the way companies do things. The airlines who are often at the forefront of crisis response, in my view anyway, so there was a recent example with Southwest Airlines where they issued a press release, but within the press release was a video statement from the CEO. I mean our tendency would be to have a statement with a quote from a senior official, it doesn’t necessarily have to be Bob, it depends on the size of the incident, scale of the incident. We encourage our communication folks to try and get some sort of a quote in there so there is a person, something that people can latch onto that the company is speaking, as you say, they all come from the press office so that’s automatic, but it’s a company statement, you really want to identify somebody in the company who’s the face of it if you like.
Moderator: Yes.
Tom: I think just to build on that I think it’s important to have a strong statement coming from the company, who exactly makes that statement will depend on the scale of the incident. Toby mentioned the British Airways hacking scandal were the CEO was the face from the beginning of that. Southwest Airlines example, again the CEO was the face of that. So, there’s a couple of examples were companies were very proactive in getting out in front of incidents like that, interestingly both airline examples.
Toby: Yes.
Tom: Reinforcing your point, Toby, that the airlines do seem to be on the leading edge of this.
Moderator: Yes, and do you think that works better?
Toby: Yes, definitely. I personally think it does, Southwest Airlines where this woman was killed, I thought was handled really well, and the British Airways one I use that as an example all the time just because British Airways were so out front, apologising, saying they’d pay compensation, saying they’d sort it out as quickly as possible. Basically, as an incident it was sort of dead within two days, I mean it was there and gone within two to three days let’s say, just because they were so up front about it. They just said all that was needed to say and that was the end of it. What can drag things out, partly an incident itself if you’ve got a massive, like we had with Macondo, a massive spill which goes on for months and months in fact, obviously the incident is going to last a long time. But if you’ve got something that you can get on top of very quickly, and say all the right things to the correct audiences, an empathetic statement and all the rest, and they feel right, they’re satisfied, then that’s it, that can resolve it very quickly.
Moderator: Yes, okay. So, do you think that an oil company is more likely to have its reputation damaged than any other company just because it’s of the type of business it is, people are less forgiving for example?
Toby: No, I don’t think that. I mean, if you look, it’s interesting, one of the earliest, sort of, IT type things, I think was it TalkTalk? You know one of the companies were there was a hacking and they handled it incredibly badly, and it nearly destroyed the company. I guess oil and gas companies, I mean, because we’re in that business, we notice them perhaps more than others, but airlines have-, I mean, sorry to keep referring to airlines, but they do have a lot of major incidents. When they have an incident, it normally involves life.
Moderator: Yes, exactly.
Toby: And that makes it a major incident automatically.
Tom: Yes, and Lauren there’s another issue here too that you have the communications aspect of the incident response, but you also have the operational response, right? So, the apology would be part of the communications response, but the operational response is the guys on the ground who are dealing with the situation, are they dealing with it competently, right, is it under control, are they doing the right things to meet the needs of the community or those who are affected. Because if that isn’t happening then your communications side isn’t going to be able to fix that, and so you’ve got to marry the two together between the operational response and the communications response.
Moderator: Okay. So, we’re dealing with a situation, we’re getting the comms out, at any point are we considering the reputation of the company or are we always trying to consider the reputation? Are we always thinking about trying to do as little reputational damage as possible while dealing with the situation and getting the comms out? So, in terms of the reputation, how are we preventing that from getting damaged in the initial stages, is it through our comms and what we’re doing, is it always in the back of your minds? I know you’re more managing the crisis, but I’m thinking overall in terms of reputational damage.
Tom: Well, again for me it comes back to what I was just talking about between the operational response and the communications response. One of the ways you demonstrate credibility and competency is that you’re able to manage incidents when they happen, and that enables you then to gain credibility if you’re prepared to deal with incidents. Because sometimes bad things happen, the question is are you prepared to manage those and to protect people and to protect communities? If you’re not then your reputation is going to suffer significantly, so again if you mess up your response, the operational response, then your reputation is going to be damaged and your communications process probably isn’t going to fix that.
Tom: So, reputation is tied very closely to your ability to manage these incidents effectively.
Moderator: Exactly.
Toby: Yes, I agree with that. Of course the one thing you can do, you can slightly ameliorate the reputational damage that’s caused by a bad response if you like, slightly, but one thing you can certainly do is make it a lot worse with your communications response. If you’ve got a bad operational response and then you’ve got a bad communications response, you know that will make things obviously a lot worse, it’ll be hard to recover from that.
Moderator: Right, okay.
Tom:
Yes, or if you have a good operational response and a bad communications response, then you’re still in trouble because the world may perceive that you have a big problem even if you don’t, if you managed it, but your communications failed to adequately cover that.
Toby: Good point.
Moderator: Okay, so they have to work side by side.
Tom: Yes.
Moderator: So, this is a bit of a broad question, but how important is social media in a crisis. It’s a broad question I know, sorry, but we can sort of talk about apologising on social media, that happens a lot of the times, Kentucky Fried Chicken for example, how important is it really?
Tom: Well from my perspective, social media is a communications channel, it’s one of those we need to use to manage a response, one of multiple channels. As time goes by it’s a more (TC 00.20.00) and more critical pathway to reach our stakeholders, because more people are gathering their information and their news from social media. So, it really is super important that we engage on social media as part of our response.
Moderator: Yes.
Toby: Yes, and I think also, it’s interesting because you used the KFC example, that was really interesting because I think their response was, well it wasn’t entirely on social media, but it was very heavily focused on social media. I guess because they’re a consumer focused company their audiences tend to, you know, people they’re appealing to are consumers who are more likely to see stuff in social media than other media, I guess, particularly these days. What was also very interesting about KFC is that they responded with a very humorous message.
Tom: Advertising.
Toby: Yes, they laughed at themselves which actually worked incredibly well, but you can’t imagine that happening for that many different types of industry or companies.
Moderator: No, exactly.
Toby: And it was an incident, what was it they ran out of chicken, I mean it’s not like anybody died or anybody was ill or anything.
Moderator: Well exactly, I mean you can kind of laugh about that anyway because it’s quite laughable that they ran out of chicken, so the fact that they took it upon themselves to say this is funny in some ways, it did work.. I think we can probably wrap it up, but is there anything else that you’d like to say about how an apology fits into crisis communications timeline or anything else?
Toby: I’d be careful to focus on the word ‘apology’ because it has so many different meanings and so many legal meanings, I would say that what people expect to see from a company, what you’d hope that a company would show very quickly is some sort of humility and empathy. That doesn’t necessarily mean an apology, but it means an empathetic and humble message needs to come across, we’re on the case, we realise that people are affected and/or environment is affected, whatever it is. And that needs to come across really, really quickly. Particularly, you refer to social media, in this day of social media, if you aren’t getting messages out quickly through social media you’ll have a real rear guard action to try and claw back the issue. So, I would say that rather than, necessarily-, not necessarily an apology per se. I mean, you might be able to issue an apology straight away depending on the situation, and particularly if there have been fatalities, you’d need to be able to say how sorry you are or how your thoughts are with the families and friends, relatives of those who have been affected. That needs to be done really quickly, that cannot be delayed. Even that as if we found in Algeria, there are all sorts of reasons that even that sort of a message can be delayed, legal reasons mainly involving international jurisdictions and all sorts of things, unfortunately it’s never quite as straight forward as you’d hope it would be, but I mean when Tom and I are training, I think the thing we’re doing is making it uppermost in people’s minds that they’re thinking along those lines. Even if they can’t do it, there’s got to be a good reason for not doing it, but they should be definitely trying to get some sort of a message out like that.
Moderator: Okay, lovely, that’s been really helpful, thank you. I’ll send a transcript to you incase there’s anything in there that you think, no, I don’t want anyone to see that, but I don’t think there is, but I’ll send it to you anyway. As I said in my e-mail it’s only going to be the university that’s going to see it, and it’s just kind of forming part of my methodology towards my dissertation.