RESPOND QUICKLY OR RISK RUMORS - A TIGER WOODS LESSON
Quote of the Month: My mind works like lightning – one brilliant flash and it is gone. — Anonymous
My daughter, visiting for the holidays from Nashville, told me I shouldn’t stress about getting my e-zine out by my self-imposed end-of-the-month deadline. As she pointed out, few of you are waiting anxiously for it to appear at this time of year. Maybe fewer still want to hear any more about the whole Tiger Woods fiasco. But there is a central tenet of crisis communications that is illustrated so well in this example, I felt I should not overlook making the point.
The morning that the story broke about the “minor traffic incident” near his home, as soon as Tiger refused to talk to the police who wanted to interview him, I said to my husband, “There’s something seriously wrong here.” The more he refused to talk to the police or make a meaningful public comment about it, the stronger my conviction became that a major crisis was brewing.
With the revelations of the ensuing weeks, we all realize just how deep and wide Tiger’s problems are. We all have witnessed how someone with a lofty reputation, based on superb skills and abilities, could become the butt of late-night comic jokes and be an embarrassment to many of those who paid him millions to have his name attached to their products and services.
I’m not going to re-hash all that has been said or sit in moral judgment. All I want to do is point out how an information vacuum will lead very quickly to a multitude of rumors and speculation about what might have happened. In Tiger’s case, I can understand why he was silent at the beginning. He could not tell the police a story that would have later become known as lies.
Think about this if you and your organization are suddenly thrust into the midst of a crisis. If you have an industrial accident where someone is hurt or one of your products malfunctions and endangers someone, the longer you wait to tell your side of the story, the more other people will frame the story, probably making it worse than it really was.
So speed is required. In order to respond quickly, pre-planning is necessary. Whatever negative thing is likely to occur at your organization should have been discussed ahead of time. For each brainstormed potential crisis identified, decisions must be made. What would be your first response? What would you say to the traditional media and social networking sites? If you have facts to explain what happened, but you wait too long to get it out there, you run the risk of being overrun by the half-truths and innuendos that are already circulating. You will be put on the defensive, having to spend a lot of time putting out fires.
Tiger’s situation is magnified because his behavior seems to go back over several years. He cannot claim momentary weakness, a one-time thing. As I have always stressed in my media training workshops, first organizations must DO the right thing. Then, and only then, can they SAY the right thing. If you do not have a good strong story to tell, no public relations guru is going to be able to wave a magic wand and make it all go away with no damage to your reputation.
But if you do have a reasonable explanation for what happened, be sure you are ready and able to communicate it quickly so that you can get on top of the story instead of having to play catch-up and losing control.
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HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU!
I sincerely hope that 2010 will be a healthy and prosperous one for you and your family. On a professional level, I can only hope that one of your New Year’s resolutions is that you will take at least one more step in the area of crisis preparedness, and do it as early in the year as possible. (References below are to my book, “Keeping Cool on the Hot Seat: Dealing Effectively with the Media in Times of Crisis.”)
If you haven’t started anything yet, at least do the brainstorming with your senior managers of possible things that could go wrong in your organization (Chapter 3).
If you’ve brainstormed, but haven’t done the next step of developing your plan of who you would need to call and what your first actions would be, see Chapter 4 and use page 20 as a template for a crisis communications plan.
If you’ve done this work for a few of your potential crises, work on a few more of them this year. (Remember, if you’ve done the brainstorming thoroughly, there will be LOTS of items on your list! If everyone in your organization does not understand who the designated spokespersons are (your highest ranking official is certainly one, but not primary in my opinion), see Chapter 5.
If you’ve done all this, but you haven’t put your senior managers who would function as a Crisis Management Team through a great media training workshop in the past two years, call me!!!! I’d be happy to work with you.
And if you haven’t had a recent (within the past year) mock crisis drill to assess whether everything would work the way it should, make that a project for the coming few months. (If you need help with coming up with some scenarios to test things out, I’d be glad to provide them - just contact me. No charge.)
Again, Happy New Year!
Judy Hoffman
1-800-848-3907 PIN 2145
jchent@earthlink.net
www.judyhoffman.com
JCH Enterprises, 116 Nelson Lane, Clayton, NC 27527, USA
