Category: Uncategorized

If the last few months of American politics and national security news have done anything, it’s proving that secrets rarely are. We live in a time when people debate, openly and in a completely non-absurdist way, whether or not information wants to be free. I say that information doesn’t want anything. People want power and in today’s world, information is power. Releasing withheld information is a play to shift power as much as withholding information is a play to maintain power.

The super-smart security expert Bruce Schneier believes that secrets are getting harder and harder to keep these days:

[I]t is possible to build a career in the classified world of government contracting, but there are no guarantees. Younger people grew up knowing this: there are no employment guarantees anywhere. They see it in their friends. They see it all around them.

Many will also believe in openness, especially the hacker types the NSA needs to recruit. They believe that information wants to be free, and that security comes from public knowledge and debate.

We live in a world where information is currency, but it is a currency that has a shelf-life measured in minutes. The five seconds it takes to tweet a piece of previously-secret information is all it takes for it to be completely worthless. Everyone has access to it now due to viral messaging. But that wasn’t always the case. Secrets-holders used to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. Through delaying, denying and denigrating, the powerful could make those scoops go away. Could wait it out until the media became interested in something else.

Today though? Just ask Anthony Weiner about putting the genie back in the bottle. Once information is released, it is released. Full stop.

The problem with this, and the reason for today’s post is because some crisis communications folks still think that they can unring bells. That they can delay, deny and denigrate until the story has blown over. Today we’re talking about our friends at Star Alliance, and this picture:

It’s an image taken after a Thai Airlines jet had a problem landing at an airport in Bangkok, Thailand. Things went wrong, as they sometimes do, and 14 people ended up in the hospital. No big deal, right? Now look at the jet, and try to find the Thai Airlines logo. If you look at the jet in the air behind it, you’ll see the logo, up front, above the windows. But not on our crashed jet. According to a spokesperson:

Thai Airways official Smud Poom-On said that “blurring the logo” after an accident was a recommendation from Star Alliance known as the “crisis communication rule,” meant to protect the image of both the airline and other members of Star Alliance.

And this is what I mean by secrets aren’t for very long. All it took was one person to see the absurdity of the situation and snap a picture of a similarly-colored and painted jet in the background to demonstrate how useless an effort covering up the logo of the airlines was.

That was supposed to be the end of the story, but writing this made me think about if I’d seen this before. I never had (some crisis communication rule, eh?), even in plane crashes of other Star Alliance airlines, like United or US Air or, I don’t know, Asiana Airlines (and their very recognizable and definitely not painted over logo). Why the difference in tactics?

My Communications Director is old school. He knows that social media drives a lot of what his work is and understands its importance, but he’s no big fan. He knows, too, that I think it’s the future of how we will communicate, so he takes no small pleasure in telling me that social media going away. He sends me every media article that demonstrates how Facebook or Twitter are dying and kids today prefer to gossip via smoke signals. I protest and tell him that social media use has increased by 800% percent in the last eight years (!!!Wow!!!) and that I can see him aging in front of me. It’s our thing, I call him a dinosaur and he calls me johnny-come-lately.

But then I saw this sublimely titled article, Why Social Media Will Disappear, and it definitely caused me to stop and think. The idea behind this article isn’t specifically what my Comms Director rails about, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what he actually means. Social media is going away. The thing, though, is that media relations is going away, too. So is outreach and ultimately public information. (Gasp!)

And by going away, I mean going away from how they’re currently done. Right now, we deal with each area separately. We do media relations, then stop and turn on our social networks. When that’s done, we start working on public outreach. As my good friend Patrice says, this is the Age of Social Convergence. All of those separate, disparate, specially sourced, funded and hired roles will become one. We will do media relations and regulatory community outreach both via social media. Reporters will get notified about breaking news at the same time as the public.

As traditional media becomes social, all media will just be “media.”

That “social media ninja” that clucks at your agency’s media-centric outreach is in just as much danger of becoming outdated as you. Your agency might not be as tech-savvy as they need to be, but that fellow isn’t as mass media-savvy as he needs to be. And none of us are as experienced at risk and crisis communications as we should be.

So, where does this leave us? Happy that austerity is forcing us to learn everyone else’s job? (Probably not.) How about excited about the opportunities that we will be faced with to rethink our relationships with each type of communication? I’m already rethinking our relationship with the media, salivating at the possibility of directed public notification, relationship building with information super-spreaders, the list goes on!

Moving forward, don’t invest solely in social media any more than you would solely invest in media relations. Take what you are good at today and figure out where you can supplement that expertise. Think of novel ways to combine them. Become the industry leader in that industry that doesn’t–yet–exist.

Just placing your message in front of people, especially in today’s cacophonous world, simply does not work. Much like we zoom past dozens of billboards on our way to work every day without even noticing that they’ve changed, getting your message out is a poor way to measure how well you’re messaging. Our social marketing friends will tell you that’s a core component to the work that they do: measure success by success (also known as behavior change), not by opportunity for change (also known as failure to change).

But when we move out of tightly controlled social marketing situations and academia, how do you measure success? How does government measure success? Well, for a long time, it was counting eyeballs. We gave out 500 brochures, our bus ads were seen by 100,000 people, our website got 10,000 hits, our Facebook page has 1,500 likes. But just because people saw our message doesn’t mean that the message was successful, just that the medium was.

As eyeball-counting has lost its luster, comms folks have started talking about engagement, especially in social media. How many times were we retweeted? How many folks shared our Facebook post? This is definitely growth from the days of billboards and newspaper ads, so it’s a good thing. And while we can’t evaluate behavior change, we can count behavior, albeit small. This is a Good Thing.

But when we figure out good things, we inevitably find shortcuts. We find cheaters. We find folks who create “zombie communities.” We find folks like those who run Bank of America’s Twitter account:

When Twitter user @darthmarkh tweeted about how he was chased away by cops after drawing chalk in front of a New York City Bank of America that was pointing out how BofA was taking away people’s homes, the BofA Help Twitter account decided to jump in and asked @darthmarkh if he needed help with his account… completely ignoring the fact that @darthmarkh was eviscerating Bank of America right in front of its face.

In an effort to make sure to engage with everyone that reached out them, Bank of America automated its responses. So when other folks chimed in to continue to complain, guess what the Bank of America Twitter account did? Yep, ran through it’s entire list of pre-approved, empathetic, personally-signed tweets responding to them all. (If you want to see the whole insane back and forth, Gizmodo has a huge image of it here.

What does this mean for us? Well, first of all, don’t ever do that. Ever. Second, think about what you’re trying to accomplish. Do you need to be everything to everyone? Is there ever a time to engage less? (Yep, we talked about this yesterday.) This post on GovLoop highlights one of the real pitfalls of trying to be everything to everyone:

Both individuals and organizations who try to engage on too many platforms will find that it’s almost impossible to maintain that engagement without increased and/or dedicated resources. If they don’t increase their resource commitments, they are very likely to end up with abandoned digital properties and other digital detritus.

We need to focus on energy on where it’s most useful. If that means replying to every tweet that mentions you, then make sure you can support that. For most of us that’s not possible, so don’t set up a system that requires that. Don’t shortcut it. The public knows and with the viral nature of that social media you’re trying to exploit, well, let’s just say you don’t want to end up on Gizmodo.