Doctored photo "crisis": BP just can't catch a break

We've been reading in the last couple of days about a new front that's opened up in BP's oil spill PR crisis: an altered photo of its crisis command centre.

Photos from msnbc.com

The original photo was altered so as to show images from actual BP cameras on all the crisis centre screens, rather than having two of them blank (I read somewhere that the blanks were feeds from equipment that was undergoing maintenance when the shot was taken). A BP spokesperson is quoted as having admitted that the photo was altered, and having shared the original photo when the alteration was pointed out.

Was this an attempt to deceive the public about BP's crisis response?

I doubt it. Whoever did the editing likely just thought the photo would (objectively) look better with all screens showing images -- which of course it does (again, objectively). That person's job is to produce quality images; he/she isn't necessarily a PR person, and isn't necessarily thinking about the potential perceived implications of altering an image in this way.

I once had a designer Photoshop the open eyes of a woman over the closed eyes of a man, for an annual report. The male subject was a member of the company's Board of Directors, with a very full schedule: the designer just figured it'd be easier to Photoshop in some open blue eyes (hey, who's gonna notice? Blue eyes are blue eyes!) than to try to get on the guy's calendar, replicate the lighting, etc. etc. in the short timeframe we had available before going to print. Of course, this gentleman was now wearing a thick layer of mascara, but still...

Fortunately, I noticed it before the report went to print, and we found an alternate solution (also involving Photoshop: we put the previous year's open-eyed picture on the current year's background). But if I hadn't noticed, it would've gone to print that way, and I'm sure I'd have had a little PR crisis of my own as a result, even though no harm was meant by the photo edit.

(I also learned an important lesson, and from then on, wrote a clause into all agreements with designers that no changes were to be made to any images or text without our express agreement.)

Did the photo editor have bad intentions when he/she made the change?

I doubt that too.

As in the case of my well-meaning if judgmentally-impaired designer, I suspect this photo editor just wanted a better image. He likely didn't see the alteration as material to the message communicated by the photo, and probably thought he was doing his client a favour.

Does the incident exacerbate BP's already enormous PR problem?

You bet it does.

I've already seen a number of posts from online commenters equating the doctored photo with dishonesty in BP's crisis response in general -- the overall theme being "if we can't even trust that their photos are real, after all this time, why should be we believe anything they say?" The msnbc.com story linked above quotes Americablog reporter John Aravosis as having said "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center."

Ouch.

BP is taking it on all fronts. Its crisis response has been condemned at all levels (both in terms of its actions to stop the leak and its communications), and what may be well-intended actions of people on its own team are making it worse.

I have to admit, a part of me is feeling sorry for BP's corporate communicators.

Can you anticipate the bad decisions your team members are going to make? Sometimes yes, but usually, no.

All you can do is to keep everyone involved in your crisis communications response as tightly-knit as you can, do what you can to ensure everyone understands the stakes and is plugged in to the existing and changing perceptions "out there," and communicate openly both within and outside the organization.

And keep your fingers crossed. And if it's what you do, pray.

If you're lucky, no-one on your team will do anything that'll make a very bad situation even less flattering to your client.

If you're not lucky, at least now you'll know that, once upon a time at BP, someone likely had it worse.

You can't hide from your own typos in cyberspace...

...so proofread well.

Note: this is a post about typos and Twitter, not what should or shouldn't be built at Ground Zero.

Mediaite ran a piece yesterday about a message Sarah Palin had tweeted earlier in the day.

The story says it appears someone inside Palin's camp recognized the vocabulary error (i.e., that "refudiate" is not a word), and the tweet was quickly replaced on Palin's Twitter account with the following:

While deleting the original tweet was the best thing Palin could have done under the circumstances, the quick action didn't stop many, many people (like comedian Andy Borowitz, below) from having fun with the error.

If it was deleted quickly, how did so many people see it?

Programs like TweetDeck download tweets in close to real-time, meaning that once you've tweeted something, it's likely been downloaded somewhere.

Once it's been downloaded, the TweetDeck user can save the tweet indefinitely -- and can post a screenshot that will last long after you've deleted the original from your Twitter account.

I've experienced this myself: I recently published a tweet containing an error, recognized it immediately, logged in to twitter.com, deleted it and published a new one... but not before one of my followers had re-tweeted the original to all of her followers.

Luckily for me, there are fewer people in the business of catching and ridiculing my mistakes than Sarah Palin's.

Proofread, proofread, proofread.

The moral of this story, of course, is to make sure your message is correct before you hit "send."

To do that effectively, you need to be able to spot your own error as such; so I'm not sure that even extra-careful proofreading would have helped Sarah Palin this time around (see video below, about 1 minute in).

But still.

Proofread. It's good for you.

And if you have a tendency to invent words, have a friend proofread for you, too.

How PR can return Mel Gibson to his former glory

That's a trick title. It can't*.

*Even in the seemingly unlikely event that the latest Mel Gibson violent tirade recording doesn't turn out to be authentic.

[Photo from smartdogs.wordpress.com]

A recently-released recording, purported to be of movie star Mel Gibson spewing hateful, violent, racist vitriol at an ex-girlfriend over the phone earlier this year, has renewed interest in the Mel-Gibson-is-a-hateful-jerk storyline, both online and in the mainstream media.

The AP story I linked to above (and again here) says that Radar Online, which broke the story, claims to have confirmed the authenticity of the recording, and says that Gibson has (so far) refused to comment on it.

A sequel even more action-packed than the original

In 2006, Gibson was reported to have gone on an anti-semitic tirade while being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving (an aside: if you Google "Mel Gibson anti-semitic tirade" today, you'll get 1.9 billion results).

Gibson may have recognized after the 2006 incident that his career could be in peril as a result. He apologized publicly, issuing statements including the following:

"I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said."

While I agree that reports of the incident portrayed what seemed to be a person "completely out of control," and that what he said was despicable, I never buy apologies in which people claim to have said things when drunk which they don't actually believe when sober. From what I've observed, people are more honest when they're drunk, not less.

To my ears at least, that statement sounded like Gibson was lying even as he sought to be forgiven for his racist remarks. In fancy PR terminology, we call that "not good."

Gibson's image has carried the stink of that incident ever since. Kim Masters, editor at large for The Hollywood Reporter, says that in "the mainstream Hollywood community" Gibson is "a pariah."

What will movie fans think this time around?

As bad as Gibson's 2006 statements were, his reported 2010 performance, which denigrates more groups in repugnant terms, is even more offensive (the recording is now available from a number of sources online, but do yourself a favour and take my word for it).

With that said, some people will still want to go see his movies because they like his movies, and don't care what kind of a person he is.

Yet others are racist and/or misogynist, and may be more likely to consider seeing his movies because they'll respect him for having expressed views similar to their own.

But if this recording is authentic, I suspect Gibson will have a much tougher time getting the rest of us to forget about this (now) pattern of hateful outbursts, and to want to support him by seeing his movies.

Is there anything he can do to improve his PR?

Of course; there are always things you can do.

• He can get some help -- if not for continued alcohol abuse issues, then at least for anger management and sensitivity training -- and then come out the other side and be open about it. He doesn't have to (nor should he) go on at length and share every gory detail, but he should honestly admit to having been wrong, apologize publicly, and encourage others who share his problems to get help.
• He can use his wealth, influence and profile to do good things; for example, contributing to the fight against racism and domestic violence.
• And of course, he can change his ways and make good movies, in the hopes that, with time, people will gradually put their disgust on the back burner (Americans are, on the whole, a pretty forgiving lot).

But PR can't fix everything.

While some people may be able to excuse one racist/violent outburst, I suspect many more won't be able to ignore two. Mel Gibson now appears to have shown that his reported 2006 tirade wasn't an isolated incident; it's an alleged pattern of behaviour which would seem to reflect the way he really sees the world.

If he does get help, admit to/apologize for his hateful speech, and make some attempt to atone by helping combat the kind of thinking he reportedly espoused, I suspect a fair number of his former fans will admire his guts, even if they aren't ever able to entirely like him again.

Good, honest PR, reflecting an earnest effort to deal with his issues and to change, could do Mel Gibson's image a lot of good, and could help mitigate the damage at the box office.

But if this latest recording really is what it appears to be (and, frankly, even if it isn't), Gibson won't ever be able to fully restore the good-guy, family-man image of his Lethal Weapon days. His name will always have an asterisk next to it, which I don't think any amount of PR will be able to completely erase.

"The iPad changes everything."

This is my Mum, and that is her iPad.

Photo credit: Dad's iPhone

Mum will be delighted, I'm sure, to have me tell you she just celebrated a big birthday. And for her birthday, Dad got her an iPad.

Now, Dad has always been an early adopter when it comes to technology. Mum: not so much. She has never used a PC, doesn't have a cell phone, and took a while to warm up to automatic teller machines, if I remember correctly. Like many of her generation, Mum has steered clear of computers: not finding them intuitive, she always found it simpler (and friendlier!) to just talk to people if she had something to say.

Over the years, though, Mum has admitted to feeling a bit left out at times, when we kids and Dad would share items of interest by email and on Twitter. Every once in a while we'd talk about getting her an email account, but she wasn't too jazzed about using Dad's computer.

"The iPad changes everything."

A speaker discussing social media said this at the CPRS conference early last month. We've already heard that women aged 45-55 are the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook, and the speaker was absolutely right: the iPad will only add to that.

Little did I know that only weeks later, I'd see how devices like the iPad will bring new constituencies online in my own family.

Mum has had her iPad two weeks, and already emails regularly, reads all her kids' blogs, checks out YouTube videos, is on Facebook, and uses an app to play Scrabble with my sister and me. Its uncomplicated interface makes it all easy, and takes away the intimidation factor for someone who's never used a computer.

This isn't a sales pitch for the iPad

I don't even have one... yet! But it is worth thinking about from a PR perspective.

As devices like the iPad make online communication more accessible, ever-widening audiences will be looking to communicate with the companies, organizations, and governments that serve them on the Web.

The smart ones will be there, ready and waiting to engage.

Air Canada shows impact of customer-facing employees on PR

This isn't another I-hate-Air-Canada blog post - there are many of those already (don't believe me? Google it).

This is a blog post about how a company's customer-facing employees are just as important to its PR as its PR people (if not more).

The back story (OK, a bit of a rant)

On Sunday evening, my family and I had the misfortune of having to fly home to Winnipeg from Ottawa. (For the record, that's a misfortune because of the circumstances of the travel, not the destination!)

It was a terrible night weather-wise in Toronto, which was the site of our connecting flight. Terrible weather is out of the airlines' control, and I completely understand that flights sometimes have to be delayed as a result. But how an airline handles its customers when things get hairy has an enormous impact on how they see the company.

Our flight to Winnipeg was originally scheduled to leave Toronto at 9 p.m. Because of weather-related delays elsewhere, our Ottawa-Toronto flight arrived late, and we were worried we'd miss the connection. We asked about it as we exited the plane, and were told to ask the customer service agent who'd be waiting for us at the top of the jetway.

That agent told us to go to the same gate for the same time as she'd provided the man in line in front of us, who'd given a different flight number. I asked her to confirm that was right; her response: "Here, I'll write it down for you."

We arrived at the gate she'd indicated, and it was indeed boarding another flight. I asked the woman working that gate, who told me her job was to load that flight, and that I'd have to find the departures board to get my answer; she was also too busy to tell me where that board was.

As I looked for the departures board, I saw another employee on the phone at a gate which didn't have any flight listed. I stood there for a few minutes while she pretended not to see me, and was then told "Look, I can't help you. I was just passing by here and needed to use the phone."

I found the board, and our gate. When our flight finally boarded an hour late (not Air Canada's fault: remember, weather), it was approximately 10 p.m. When our flight actually pulled away from the gate for our flight, it was midnight.

In between, our Airbus 320 full of hot, cranky customers sat at the gate, without air conditioning on, waiting. And waiting.

Every 20 minutes or so, we'd get an announcement over the PA system reassuring us that the delay "shouldn't be too much longer now" or something to that effect. At one point, they added that we were just waiting for the pilot.

Waiting for the pilot?

After well over an hour, another pilot who was on our flight to travel home to Winnipeg after a 15+ hour day of his own came on the PA, and explained that our pilot's previous flight had been diverted to Ottawa due to Toronto weather, and they'd only found this out as we'd finished boarding.

More than an hour earlier.

While we were grateful that someone had finally respected us enough to tell us what was going on, the content of his announcement was infuriating: somewhere along the line, someone had decided that while these poor suckers on the plane were going to have to sit through a very uncomfortable couple of hours, it was better to leave them all there on the plane than to go to the trouble of letting them off and then re-boarding.

It's not like we'd pushed away from the gate and would have to drive back in: the gate door was open, and we could easily all just have walked off. (At least, that's how it seemed to us as we got progressively angrier: if there's some Transport Canada regulation preventing it, they could have done themselves a favour by telling us that.)

A woman sitting behind me began to sound panicked about an hour into the wait, telling the flight attendants she was about to pass out from the heat. Their response: "We'll be coming through the cabin shortly with a water service." The temperature in the plane got so hot that when the pilot did finally arrive and turn on the air conditioning, we could see the condensation in the air, like when you exhale on a cold night.

The best timing of the night award went to the flight attendant who, immediately after the announcement that we were waiting for the pilot (without explanation yet as to why he was delayed), came through the cabin offering headphones so we could enjoy the on-board entertainment system while we waited... for three dollars. Credit cards only, please, we don't take cash. I'm not making this stuff up.

What does all this have to do with PR?

I attended a presentation years ago at an IABC International Conference in New York City, by a Swedish PR guy who talked about the role of customer service in defining your company's brand.

He gave an example that struck home, and has remained with me since. He pointed out that his wife doesn't love him because he issues a news release every morning at breakfast extolling his own virtues: she loves him because of the way he treats her. He shows concern, he takes out the garbage and helps with the kids, he is interested in her and what interests her, he makes her laugh -- it has little to do with messaging or positioning or tactics.

His excellent advice: corporate PR departments need to realize that our customers' relationships with our brands work the very same way. As he put it, if your customers are having a bad experience of your brand in your stores or at your events (or in your airplanes), nothing you can say in a news release is going to change their perception of the brand.

So, pack up the PR department and go home?

Of course not; rather, his advice was for PR to realize that our customers have far more interactions with our front-line employees than they ever do with the products of the PR department -- so we should prioritize employee communications in our corporate communication strategies.

Employees who understand their role in defining the company brand, who understand what customers need, want and expect, who are motivated to give those customers a good experience, and who are empowered to do so, will have a far greater impact on your company's reputation than anything else your PR department will ever do.

It's entirely possible that there were reasonable explanations for all the decisions my fellow travelers and I cursed Sunday night; but even if there were, no-one told us. So our impression of Air Canada's customer service was set.

Customers are a fickle bunch. Over the years, I've had plenty of uneventful (i.e. good enough) flights on Air Canada, and have even experienced excellent Air Canada customer service for myself (a flight I try to forget, on which my then-infant daughter threw up all over me and flight attendants did everything they could to help me and mitigate the mess for my fellow travellers).

But Sunday night, as my now-three-year-old looked at me, eyes glassy, little face red as a tomato and hair soaked with perspiration, and said "We coming down for a landing?" before we'd even left the tarmac, none of that mattered.

Unfortunately for the companies which serve him/her, a customer's impression of a brand is only as good as his/her most recent interaction with it. So PR folks are well-advised to make sure employee communications is at the top of their strategy list.

Arizona state senator learns: no such thing as a small potatoes interview

A YouTube video of high school student Keith Wagner's recent interview with Arizona state senator John Huppenthal about cuts to education funding reveals a politician who likely believed a student journalist interview to be low-stakes, not worthy of much preparation.

I'll bet he sees it differently now.



The three versions of this video I found on YouTube (one longer, one shorter) have attracted, so far, more than 281,600 views -- far more than Huppenthal likely expected to be reached by the student's assignment.

Before the Internet, politicians (and other public spokespeople) did interviews with large media outlets and small ones, each of which had a relatively defined audience.

An interview with a reporter from a small-town newspaper would normally only ever reach an audience in that small town -- or maybe a few bored out-of-town visitors. And an interview with a high school student might even be seen less as a serious interview than as a community relations gesture.

In a classic 1990s episode of Seinfeld, Jerry learned the hard way that, even before the Internet, an interview with a relatively small media outlet didn't necessarily mean the story would be confined to its audience, if the news was interesting enough. And now that we have all the tools of Web 2.0, interesting stories are that much easier to share.

This summer vacation, Sen. Huppenthal might consider catching up on his Peachtree TV viewing, familiarizing himself with YouTube, and getting some media training.

"You don't need social media."

Don't be this guy.

Image from Fellowship of the Minds

I'm in Regina at the national conference of the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS), an event which I attend every few years, and which always leaves me with a renewed passion for our profession. This year it's even more exciting for me, as I pick up information and resources that'll be helpful to my students, as well.

In addition to all that good stuff, today I picked up a little knowledge that surprised me a bit, but which actually means good things for my students. And what was it?

That there are still PR pros ignoring (or is it denying?) the influence of social media.

I attended a session this afternoon given by Joe Thornley and Martin Waxman, two of the three hosts of the PR podcasts on Inside PR. Their presentation, "Social Media Trends to Watch," gave an overview of the impact social media are having on the way we communicate and on the practice of PR, and was pretty well-attended.

From quick show-of-hands polls Thornley and Waxman did during the session, it appeared that a significant portion of the crowd was not yet active in social media other than LinkedIn, which it seemed a majority had used.

Just so there's no misunderstanding...

I don't think everyone should be using social media (yet). Social media are only effective in reaching audiences which use social media (or are influenced by those who do). If you know your audiences don't use social media, it would be irresponsible to be investing significant client resources in them.

The folks who came to this session without much experience with social media were doing exactly what they should be doing. They came to find out what the big deal is about, and to learn how these tools can be used, which will help them be better counsel to their clients than they would be if they were unaware of the potential social media offer.

But then... overheard in the elevator...

In the elevator back up to our rooms after the session, a number of the people who'd attended started talking about social media. "Oh my God, that stuff just went right over my head," said one. "I don't think we really need to know about all that," said another. And a third: "Oh, you don't."

You don't?

They then reassured each other that it's just very niche groups using social media, and that if they aren't targeting those groups, they don't need to worry about it.

Don't believe it.

Unless you plan to retire next week, don't believe that you can ignore social media if you want to be competitive in the job market, and if you want to be able to provide solid strategic advice to your clients.

While not every audience uses social media, and only audiences using social media will be receptive to PR efforts that employ them, a good PR counsellor needs to know about them and how they work in order to provide sound advice.

That advice may well be to direct resources to other efforts – traditional media relations, special events, community relations, whatever – but unless you understand what's out there and how it may touch your client's audiences, there'll be a blind spot in the counsel you provide.

Making yourself aware of and conversant only in the issues and tools you know to be of interest to your audiences at this moment in time is like wearing a suit that only has a front. If your audience stays in that perfect spot right in front of you, you're fine. But if anyone moves, you'll be... exposed.

And one thing all PR pros should know is that someone always moves.

Ignore social media – or any significant communication tool – at your peril

Now may not be the right time for your client to be undertaking social media efforts. But maybe your client's business will change; or maybe your client's audience will change; or, maybe, you may just want to go work for someone else someday. Someone, that is, whose audiences are talking about – and wanting to interact with – your client online.

In any of those cases, my colleagues from the elevator will be out of luck – and a practitioner who's more open to embracing change in communications, like a recent Red River College CreComm grad, for instance, will be waiting to step in.