Duckett was leaving a meeting on Nov. 19 about fixing the health care system when reporters asked what he thought about criticism of Alberta Health Services.
When asked why he won’t stop and talk, he exclaims, “I’m still eating my cookie!”
Now this is a good one.
For all of those times when your media trainer has said that no comment is one of the worst things you can do, refer to this video.
On September 29, 1982, Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois died. The doctors speculated that the cause was a capsule of Extra Strength Tylenol. A family member grieved over Facebook.
Later that day, Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, died in the hospital shortly thereafter, also seemingly caused by Extra Strength Tylenol. A nurse tweeted about the incident. It was retweeted by four people within the hour. Within 12 hours there were 2,000 tweets. Groups of concerned bloggers posted hundreds of notes warning their readers to throw out their Tylenol bottles. Thousands of nervous consumers tossed their Tylenol bottles.
By the next morning, the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Associated Press all had stories out about the scare. All this occurred within 24 hours and before Tylenol had a chance to react.
This post is a neat little thought experiment that helps put our idea of a crisis communication success in context. Imagine if what I quoted above really did happen. Do you think that we’d be touting Tylenol’s response as one to emulate?
Or a better question might be, is a crisis communication success like that possible today? Later in the post, the author notes that Johnson & Johnson took more than a week to craft their response. And today we talk about what a great job they did. Then, when Tylenol had recalls earlier this year, we clucked and shook our collective head at how far Johnson & Johnson had fallen. I argue that we see the 1980’s era recall through rose-colored glasses.
A week!
If that happened today, we wouldn’t be raking Johnson & Johnson across the coals, we’d be mourning the the loss as the company went under.
There’s another thing. Today it was announced that there was yet another recall of Tylenol product (this one due to the need for better labeling of alcohol in the flavoring). This brings the total number of big Tylenol recalls this year to three.
I wonder, at that point, how the messaging changes. Should Johnson & Johnson continue to react to these recalls as singular events with a start and finish? At what point do they recognize the damage done to their brand is more than the sum of each recall? And how do they begin to combat that? Should they start now, and couple it with the latest recall, or as part of a separate, focused campaign about rebuilding the brand?
Furthermore, what can we, as communicators, learn from this situation. BP took a huge hit from the Deepwater Horizon spill, but I believe that the constant drip, drip, drip of bad news multiplied the negative public reaction. Long, singular events are tough, but this is different. What about a series of bad events?
Bad press, recover, bad press, mostly recover, bad press, business drops through the floor.
Does your crisis communication plan take that into account, or is it still predicated around singular events with defined ends?
As was ably demonstrated in the original post, we live in a time when a little bad news hits the national media in hours. After that initial bout of trouble, everyone knows your organization is wounded, there’s nothing to stop the media and citizen journalists from smelling blood and digging up dirt.
(There’s a local story about the Philadelphia Housing Authority former Director that I think illustrates this. What started off as a simple story about a lien placed on his house for failure to pay taxes spiraled into accusations of sexual harassment, bullying in the office, and improper spending. Once he was seen as damaged, the sharks moved in and it was only a matter of time before he resigned.)
The end of the year offers a time of reflection. It’s also the time to start planning next year’s budget. If you’re an executive who is responsible for corporate communications, consider looking at the process through a different lens. Should you fund messaging through third parties, or communicating through your own channels? No need to be draconian about it–what if you did both, shifting significant money from messaging to communicating?
Now THIS is an interesting article. I’ve argued this in the past, advocating for directly messaging your audience as opposed to utilizing middlemen (read: the media), and the author here does similarly.
He draws a distinction between distribution and messaging. He says we carve our messaging budgets into two broad areas: development and distribution. Development is either done externally or internally, with internal development of content usually being the cheaper way (read: government) because existing staff craft the message. Distribution, however is almost always done externally. We send messages to the media who pass that message along to the public we hope to reach.
The author argues that the messaging budget is written with too much focus on distribution (consider spokesperson training, press release development, etc.). He says that we should pull money from that side and reinvest it in the development side of things. My preference would be to plow it back into communication and education staff, but I can see the desire to up the budget for contracted out development. Either way, the message should get better, as opposed to the pipe that it flows through.
I argue this is better in the long run. The media, as we’ve seen, can be fickle and twist–or worse, ignore–our messaging. If we make messages that resonate with our publics, we won’t ever run into that problem again. The message will burble up through the publics and either affect the change we need, or–even better–force the media to take note.
Public Health Affairs 