A boat amid the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico

Headlines shout, “BP, Transocean Lawsuits Surge as Oil Spill Spreads in Gulf” and “BP’s Response to Oil Spill Lacking, Officials Say.” More stories … more coverage … of the worsening situation in the Gulf are being added to the first pages of Google and other search engines every few seconds, 24 hours a day.

BP’s attempts at branding itself as a “green” energy company are in shambles.

What the companies may not know is that these stories will dominate the all-important first pages of search engines for months or years to come … unless something is done, soon.

What’s lacking is any apparent attempt by BP or Transocean to aggressively manage their online images during the deepening crisis … a crisis that has global impact. A few corporate PR stories about the situation on the corporate home pages not only is ineffective, it has the adverse effect of linking everything about the corporate brands of BP and Transocean to the Gulf disaster. It’s the wrong action to take online. Attempting to manage a crisis from a corporate home page can cause self-inflicted brand damage.

What could BP and Transocean be doing online at this very moment?

They could launch and maintain special online corporate journalism sites … tangible assets as interactive places to share and constantly update all aspects of their action steps. While the Coast Guard desires to control press events, such online content management sites can focus, manage and provide the most timely, transparent and open connection with no only those involved along the Gulf Coast but everyone else in the world who is watching … and judging … how BP and Transocean behave. The special sites can be credible online assets to underscore corporate accountability.

The online crisis management team at The News Group Net – seasoned journalists and communications professionals – can have such operational newsrooms online within a matter of hours … for timely and instantaneous news updates, statements, photos, video and live coverage … far more influential information than press releases. BP and Transocean could become more reliable sources for the world’s mainstream and online news media. A single corporate Web site lacks the credibility and clout to do the job … especially to manage the fast-growing other media stories about the oil spill that are now dominating search engines.

Current predictions are that the company may lose at least $2 billion in sales because of the recalls, and is also facing dozens of lawsuits.

Whatever the reasons for the apparently sharp decline in product quality, the damage caused by Toyota’s style of turning to lobbyists and lawyers is all self-inflicted. It is  the company’s insular way of handling things. Even today, the company has yet to launch an open and genuine dialogue with American car buyers and its customers.

The company is blanketing TV and online coast-to-coast with advertisements but is not engaging with or listening to customers. When there is no open communication in a crisis, underlying mistrust festers.

Rather than focusing on openly connecting with the car buying public to rebuild trust, Toyota is perceived as arrogantly going about business as usual to sweep problems under the rug.

According to the Associated Press, Irv Miller, group vice president for environment and public affairs for the automaker, wrote earlier this year: “We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over.”

In an internal e-mail, Miller wrote:

“We better just hope that they can get NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) to work with us in coming (up) with a workable solution that does not put us out of business.”

The e-mail was addressed to Katsuhiko Koganei, executive coordinator for corporate communications for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc.

“I hate to break this to you but WE HAVE A tendency for MECHANICAL failure in accelerator pedals of a certain manufacturer on certain models,” Miller’s e-mail began with several words in capital letters. Miller has since retired from Toyota … and there seems no end to the continuous series of recalls for safety issues at Toyota.

Toyota's 2010 Lexus GX 460 sport utility vehicle

Within hours of the Consumer Reports warning, Toyota stopped selling the model. The car maker’s statement – “We are taking the situation with the GX 460 very seriously and are determined to identify and correct the issue Consumer Reports identified” – all but hinted they were already aware of the dangerous problem.

It’s about time someone in the media took on Toyota. In recent weeks, the giant car company has used storm trooper tactics – supported by paid lobbyists, lawyers and flacks – to debunk people who have encountered that they thought were safety issues with Toyota vehicles. It resulted, I believe, in Toyota framing its brand image as that of a mean-spirited corporate bully.

With its financial advertising and funding tentacles into the rest of the media, from CNN to NewsHour, there really has not been much critical or investigative reporting into what’s going on with Toyota but rather just the barest of facts and prepared soundbites from the company.

Subscriber-funded Consumer Reports has taken the gloves off. The publication has openly reported that a Toyota model is dangerous and has backed it up with facts. I have little hope, however, that other news organizations – financially strapped and dependent on advertising/funding dollars – will follow the example.

It reveals how an enormously wealthy corporation flexes its muscle when it cannot completely make a problem go away by spreading wealth around Washington. Safety issues with Toyota cars is nothing new. The problems has been going on for years but it has mostly been kept quiet … until now.

When other car companies discover a problem with a particular model, they work through government channels and a recall is issued. When Toyota has a problem, the company spends millions of dollars with Washington lobbying firms that quietly spread the wealth around Capital Hill and government agencies … and the problem has often gone away, the American driving public be damned. Toyota’s strategy is not about reassuring the public; it’s about spending money to make a problem go away.

With Toyota, their strategy reveals that it is not about listening to their customers or engaging with customers, and really, it’s not about safety.

So, now, Toyota is going around the country in a form of corporate witch hunt to discredit drivers who have encountered safety issues with Toyota cars. And, woe be the reporter who writes a word to question what the company is doing. Not very reassuring for the American driving public, in my book.

Here’s the signal Toyota is sending – if you have a problem with one of their cars, it’s your fault. Buyer beware.

Kevin Smith

Here’s where Southwest Airlines really fumbled in handling its customer and social media crisis caused when filmmaker Kevin Smith was kicked off one of its flights because he was deemed to be too fat for one seat:

Southwest responded in a traditional, predictable and completely ineffective method. Rather than the airline’s CEO Gary Kelly acting like a leader, apologizing and putting an end to the online image and media crisis for his airlines, Kelly left it up to the in-house PR and Twitter staff to attempt to patch things up with Smith. Not surprisingly, it did not work.

If Southwest had turned to its PR firm for help, chances are the support was minimal because most agencies are not skilled at working in the online world or social media. The larger the PR agency, the greater the lack of competence.

It all begin early on Valentine’s Day when Smith (Twitter: @ThatKevinSmith) was asked to leave a flight before it departed. The pilot reportedly thought Smith was too fat. Smith walked back into the terminal and begin Tweeting to his 1.5 million followers:

“Dear @SouthwestAir — I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?”

Additional Tweets came fast and furious from Smith, who also posted a 90 minute podcast to explain the whole episode.

Since then, mainstream media and online media coverage has spun out of control for Southwest Airlines, largely because the airline has been hiding behind prepared statements posted on the company Web site like the one below. CEO Kelly has acted like an old-school corporate executive with either disdain or lack of awareness for the influence of today’s digital era.

What it all signals is a lack of savvy corporate leadership and not an intelligent comprehension over the importance and power of online social media by Southwest. Any company that hides behind prepared statements is asking for brand reputation problems to continue … and recovery from such self-inflicted damage to brand reputation will be costly. And, it could have been avoided.

Should Southwest CEO Kelly come out of the shadows to act as a leader, the voice and face of his airline? Yes. That’s the responsibility of authentic corporate leaders in today’s world, regardless of whether responding to a filmmaker, like Kevin Smith, or any time his company screws up. It’s called being accountable and responsible. Kelly is signaling that he does not understand his role.

CTS is an example of a big company, singularly focused on profits, that had better get heavy duty and competent crisis communications counsel … soon.

Does CTS Corp – traded (for now) on the New York Stock Exchange as “CTS,” as they tout at the start of perhaps the dumbest corporate news release in history – accept any sliver of responsibility for a safety issue that has put millions of drivers at peril? Of course not:

“We have no knowledge of any accidents or injuries that have resulted from this rare potential condition.”

Clearly, CTS doesn’t share Toyota’s concern over safety because profits come first. Just check out promotion of all the financials on the CTS home page. It’s all financial hype.

The barely literate CTS news release goes on to make an astonishingly arrogant and dumb statement:

Toyota is a small, but important, customer of CTS, representing approximately 3% of our annual sales. CTS has been actively working with Toyota for awhile (sic) to develop a new pedal to meet tougher specifications from Toyota.

CTS Corp Web Site

To refer to Toyota – the world’s largest auto maker – and use the word, small, in the same sentence reveals an utterly clueless corporate leadership. If, indeed, only 3 percent of CTS business comes from Toyota, why then did CTS stock drop nearly 10 percent yesterday and is in a free fall?

Following the 269 word CTS news release are 465 words of “safe harbor” boilerplate that essentially says nothing CTS has stated in the 269 words is the truth. Safe harbor boilerplate is used by a dwindling number of chief financial officers and attorneys living under the illusion that it creates a shield against law suits. In other words, they believe they can lie and get away with it in news releases.

Law suits?! My guess is that CTS Corp’s CFO Donna L. Belusar, who signed her name to the release and makes $622,000 a year, ain’t seen nothing yet.

Wait until she and CEO Vinod Khilnani get before Henry Waxman’s House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill.

CTS Corp’s amateurish and reckless attempts at corporate communications are actually endangering the economic viability of the company and its shareholder value. It needs to be saved from itself.

Tiger Woods in better times.

It’s not good enough that Tiger Woods – the world’s best golfer – has accepted responsibility for a minor accident by driving his Cadillac Escalade SUV tank into a fire plug and tree. We all have bad days … or rather nights, because Woods car accident happened around 2:30 a.m.

The Tiger Woods image crisis situation that is spinning out of control isn’t about the car accident. It’s about the fact that the cops sat on the report and kept it from going public for more than 12 hours. It’s about Woods’ refusal to meet with the police. Mostly, it’s about s i l e n c e by Woods. He is creating his own nightmare at this point.

In the digital era, silence in a crisis situation can make a bad situation get worse. Silence breeds rumor, speculation and shrill gossip, the basic food groups of today’s news media.

• Is Tiger having an affair with party girl Rachel Uchitel?
• Did Tiger’s wife cause scratches on his face instead of the car smash?
• Is Tiger frantically working to find a way to spin his early morning car crash?
• Why is the Orange County (Florida) sheriff’s department giving Woods special treatment?
• Why is Woods stonewalling talking with cops?

The world’s most famous celebrity athlete is now paying a price for his fame and his silence. Silence is doing nothing but fueling rumor and igniting further world media attention and speculation. Silence, in this case and in most crisis situations, has taken on a life of its own.

My advice:

• Do something – take personal control of the situation.
• Cooperate with authorities immediately.
• Get before the cameras and microphones as quickly as possible.
• Don’t play favorites with the media.
• Do not hide behind statements that other people deliver.
• Explain what happened and tell the truth in a sincere manner. Woods’ only chance to keep it a “private” matter evaporated with his delay to act.
• Do not make any effort to “spin” the facts.
• Avoid counsel from someone like an agent or attorney because they have their own vested interests and are not communicators.
• If you made a mistake, apologize. We’ll still admire your talent, and life will go on.

Silence in a crisis situation is like a cancer untreated.

Finally, if I might add a word to Cadillac … It is obvious that your company is working feverishly to capitalize on what happened in order to market your obscenely large gas guzzlers. Your promotions in just the last 24 hours have become shameless. I am referring to the sharp increase in Internet advertising and planted stories about how safe Cadillacs are. I would label it profiteering by Cadillac at Tiger’s expense, and it demonstrates a lack of integrity by Cadillac.

Mone/AP

Northwest Airlines has had problems with its pilots, flight attendants and medieval company policies for some time now. Can you imagine trying to handle corporate communications/PR for such an outfit?!

Most recently, two Northwest Airlines pilots at the controls of an Airbus full of passengers overshot their destination by 150 miles before returning to land in Minneapolis. Maybe the pilots were asleep or debating company politics or simply had Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen turned up too high on their iPods but the dopey duo ignored urgent radio calls, cell calls, faxes and text messages from ground controllers for more than an hour while cruising over their destination at 37,000 feet. They have yet to tell the truth about what happened … which is even more troubling.

Over the last decade, Northwest has had multiple incidents of pilot intoxication, flight attendants bullying passengers and passengers being held hostage inside cramped airplane cabins for hours during delays, denied food and drink.

Hearing about the latest scandal of the pilots who forgot to land the plane, I couldn’t help but recall when I was approached by the airline about a decade ago to head their corporate communications. My impression was that top management was self-absorbed, arrogant and really didn’t give a damn for passengers, airline employees or the image of the company. It was my opinion they were only focused on profits to fluff up their own personal wealth. I declined the opportunity to work in what I thought was such an ethically corrupt management environment.

What Northwest Airlines should have done the day after this latest incident was to sack both of the pilots and serve notice that it won’t tolerate such conduct. But, the airline has not acted. Quite the contrary, it’s predictably gone underground, saying nothing … doing nothing. Not much has changed, I guess, over the last 10 years.

In short, Nokia and Siemens have sold spy equipment to the repressive Iranian government to intercept private email and Internet communications and to permit Iranian police to eavesdrop on cell phone calls and use cell signals to pinpoint the location of persons who might be protesting the recent election results in Iran by zeroing in on their cell phones.

When I heard of what Nokia and Siemens had done, my thoughts immediately went to Neda, the young Iranian student who was killed by a police sniper a few weeks ago while she was watching a protest but not participating. She was using her cell phone at the time of her death. Her senseless killing sparked days of demonstrations in Iran.

The Washington Times reports today that the actions by Siemens, a company that is no stranger to corruption and controversy, could result in the company losing “hundreds of millions of dollars in sales to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) because it sold Iran equipment used to spy on dissidents.” More than a million Persians live in the Los Angeles area and have become a powerful political force in the city.

The Obama administration has yet to name a political appointee to head communications at FEMA. It’s usually someone with no communications experience or competence so we have no reason to believe it will be otherwise. But more troubling are reports coming from the career communications staff at FEMA that the agency has not so much as inched forward in developing new outreach competencies since Katrina.

The old guard career communications managers staunchly resist learning or doing anything online. They resist blogs and social media. They resist, according to my inside sources, anything contemporary, preferring instead to crank out old-style press releases that are sent to newspapers, some of which are no longer in business. They are focusing more on their retirements, which could not come too soon, I understand.

It’s too bad because FEMA, Homeland Security and other federal agencies have been rocked by a string of embarrassing problems involving incompetent communications people who get caught in dumb scandals. The government deserves better talent.

Tomeka Rawlings, president, IABC-DC, and me

I had a terrific time last evening speaking before members of IABC’s Washington, DC, chapter to share some idea about crisis communications in the Internet era. The whole landscape has changed for how to handle a crisis.

 First, though, I want to say how nice it was to see IABC-DC’s President Tomeka Rawlings back and looking good after a recent illness.

My challenge was how to present a few ideas about crisis communications within a 30 minute speech. It comes down to this:

• Take your story online. Develop a blog-based online newsroom to tell all the stories and deliver all the messages in your universe. Write in an accessible online news style with stories no longer than 500 words. Use many appealing photos.
• Build relationships in advance of any crisis. Get to know the bloggers and the few remaining legitimate mainstream reporters who cover your space.
• Create a network of third-party thought-leaders – well in advance of any potential crisis – who speak out regularly on your behalf and post what they are saying on your interactive online newsroom.
• Be the voice and face of your industry or area of expertise through timely, relevant and meaningful information, reflected through an online newsroom.
• Don’t let the media push you around. With a couple of exceptions, much of the media is as silly as the “Gong Show.”
• PR agencies, especially the big ones, are far behind the learning curve about Web 2.0, online crisis communications and social media. Many have an obsolete business model, they just don’t know it yet.

Click here to download my presentation as a PDF (about 900k)

Special thanks DC-based photographer Marvin T. Jones – www.marvintjones.com.

Forget the old days of Mike Wallace kicking in the door with his camera crew behind him. That never really happened, anyway, even though it has become folklore in the corporate world where many CEOs fear and detest the media.

Today, an organization is more likely to get scalded and damaged by bloggers and adverse buzz on social media sites more quickly than by what’s left of the traditional, mainstream news media. In fact, chances are a mainstream news reporter may hear about a crisis situation first from a blogger … or someone on Twitter.

Today, it’s all about openness, transparency, timeliness and engaging stakeholders, the media, and, especially, bloggers who cover an industry, in an open conversation. There is not longer such a thing as a “secret.”

In planning crisis management, leaders of organizations need to know that they will be judged by how quickly they personally reach out to engage in a conversation with key audiences than hiding behind statements by a spokesperson or a lawyer. They also need to recognize how influential and powerful a communications resource the Internet has become.

The financial damage came fast, and the fallout has cut deep … the private liberal arts college watched its endowment plummet and its fund-raising drop off sharply, as many of the school’s most reliable and deep-pocketed donors suffered heavy losses in the Bernard Madoff investment scandal.

The combination delivered a heavy blow that culminated in [the] stunning announcement that Brandeis would close its renowned Rose Art Museum and sell off the 6,000-piece collection. More radical steps are on the table: eliminating staff and faculty positions, expanding enrollment to boost tuition revenue, and overhauling the entire undergraduate curriculum to cut costs and attract prospective applicants.

The scope and speed of the turmoil buffeting the Waltham campus have left many students and faculty members reeling, with many questioning the administration’s decisions to deal with the financial crisis.

That last paragraph caught my attention – “the scope and speed of the turmoil.” I don’t know anyone who has not been stunned by the depth of the current economic crisis, fed by massive corruption and greed on Wall Street. I’m not surprised – as someone who consults on strategic communications issues in the not-for-profit, academic and corporate fields – about Brandeis getting caught unprepared in the area of crisis communications. I predict we will hear of many such crises on campuses across America. No university is immune.

What exacerbates bad news, such as that from Brandeis, is that the media landscape has changed. We get our news online, for the most part, and news today spreads around the world in a nanosecond. The way to control a crisis is being prepared, in advance, not after the fact.

Crisis communications preparedness rather than crisis communications management. The former is what all universities should be focusing on today because it will help to protect a university’s reputation tomorrow when and if bad news strikes.