From emergence to emergency, don't be caught with your Tweets down.

Tue, 2009-09-08 17:23 |

David

Using social media is key to effective issues management. I used the recent holiday weekend to labor over long put-off chores around the house. These included tackling that eye-level stack of boxes that contain the paper record my career since 1976. (My grand scheme is to digitize anything of enduring importance and take advantage of my financial adviser's annual Shredder Day at the end of this month.) When I came across my well-worn presentation, How to Manage Issues before They Manage You: the Lifecycle of an Issue, I marveled at the key change that has occurred since the early 90's when I first began delivering this talk: the speed with which issues emerge and turn into full-blown crises. Then, I'd say that an issue can go from emergence to emergency in a matter of months. Today, the same cycle occurs in hours.

It all changed in 1992 when the U.S. government began pulling out of network management and allowed commercial entities to provide Internet access to the rest of us. At one time, corporate executives and managers charged with issues management could build their opinion-leader networks and databases, and prepare their position papers and communication plans in a timeframe that now seems leisurely. Today, that pace would be deadly. When I started delivering that talk, I would shock the audience members into realizing how behind the times they were by describing how I developed the lifecycle of an issue charts in one program and then converted it into another! Those were the days in which executives wrote on yellow legal pads and had secretaries who "typed it up."

Today, while some companies are still struggling with whether or not to blog, micro blogging has eclipsed blogging to become a critical tool in both issues and crisis management, not to mention marketing. While some PR folks are debating over the perfect CEO quote for a good-news release that will start with "We are pleased …," others have come to realize that news releases are fast becoming a search engine optimization tool, not a reliable method for attracting news or blog coverage.

As I say in every presentation to peers of my generation of college-educated communication professionals, we have to break the habit of "writing it up and sending it out" en masse, on paper. Along with the crazy idea that there is such a thing as "the general public" that needs to be "educated," this kind of thinking and behavior and dinosaurs have much in common.

Take a look at the requirements and baked-in assumptions of a PR course at Georgia Southern University. Here's the age-old assignment to interview a professional in the business — "and then write about it at your blog." Or this one, "Creating a profile in LinkedIn is a requirement in my PR Practicum class and is recommended for ALL my PR students." Or read this advice from the Philadelphia Inquirer's OpEd page on how to communicate with college freshman: "warm up your thumbs and start texting." Or ponder the fact that, in May, America's paper of record, the New York Times, appointed a social media editor, whose first acts included a 100-character introductory Tweet. The newspaper's Twitter feed (@nytimes) now was 1.7 million followers.

If you're a professional communicator and you want to provide wise and useful counsel to your employer or clients, you simply can't afford to be heard in public saying any these phrases:

I just don't get Twitter. Who wants to hear about what people had for lunch?"
"There's no good reason for our organization to have a Facebook page."
"I don't participate in social networks because our IT department has all of that stuff blocked."
"Video, schmideo. YouTube is for stupid pet tricks."

Any organization can be damaged by a poorly managed issue that explodes, in minutes or hours into a full-blown crisis. Don't be caught with your Tweets down.

From Barbara B. Nixon

Submitted by David on Sun, 2010-01-17 12:35.

Thank you for reading my blog and linking to it. Having my students blog about their informational interviews is one effective way they can learn from each other; it doesn't matter if the whole world reads their posts, what matters is that they can easily share the information with each other. There have been times when an informational interview conducted by one student led to a "real" interview for him/herself or another student, so I find this to be a beneficial assignment. Are your experiences with informational interviews different? And I was a bit confused about your comment about the LinkedIn assignment; not sure what the "baked-in assumptions" are about helping them network to find out more about their chosen career field. Could you clarify for me?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Replying to your question

Submitted by David on Sun, 2010-01-17 12:36.

The fact that you found this posting so quickly -- about an hour after release -- is testament to the wonders of the technology and to the point of my blog. The "baked-in" reference was both to blogs and social networks, the idea being that both are such unspoken assumptions to your students: posting to a blog instead of "handing it in;" a requirement to join a social network being unremarkable.

“We originally engaged David in 2003. Crisis communication was his specialty, and we were certainly in a crisis. He responded immediately, freeing himself up for a meeting the following day, and arriving at the meeting thoroughly prepared with a self-study understanding of the industry, and research in hand. He helped us think through our communication needs internally and externally, performed primary research with our customers on the issue at hand, and promptly developed talking points for employees and the media. The crisis at hand could have had a significantly negative impact on our financial performance at that time, and David's work helped to avert that outcome. As a result of that, and many other successful projects over the next few years, we engaged David on retainer. He has performed a "customer relationship check- up" that is impacting our strategy development, the planning and implementation of a media relations strategy, a public affairs engagement for our industry association, and frequent copywriting projects from our Wedgewood Guide to the voice over for our online tour. David is the ultimate planner. Everything has its place within the scheme of things. When he make plans, they are detailed, logical and progressive (A before B, then B before C, etc.) Before he takes action, he has thought out all the possibilities and then decided on the most probable action to take. He loves to anticipate problems. He checks and rechecks all of the details over and over before taking the first step in the plan of action. Solving problems is one of David's greatest joys. In business, David's bottom-line is dollars and cents. He is very resourceful with money and budgets. If given the right opportunity, he can stretch nickels and dimes into dollars by monitoring and planning the details of how money is acquired and spent. I highly recommend the work of David Kirk.”

Marcy Kelly is vice president, Sales and Marketing, for Wedgewood Pharmacy.

Marcy Kelly recommends David Kirk

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