Online issues and crisis management strategies

Many organisations have a problem with getting involved with a form of communication over which there is little control and which, for some, seems to have so little by way of measurable benefit.

The issues are simple management judgements about resources and effects and the potential for crisis seem to be self evident. Most of the heat in such arguments are based on prejudice, ignorance as to the capability to manage online issues or sheer funk.

Even today, many management teams are wary of the internet and many see it as a threat. For some there is no doubt that it is a threat and needs management. The PR practitioner can allay such fears and to a huge extent remove risk

Much of internet activity does not follow the usual linear models for management. The sequence of events can be disrupted by the online community. So too can many, if not most, management activities. Online PR is no different to managing any other organisational function.


The solution to mitigating risk is to adopt practices from other disciplines in which “management of the unknown” is common. Some of the greatest benefits to modern living have become possible because we know how to manage where there is uncertainty. Examples of how organisations have developed risk management strategies range for the UK Health and Safety Executive to Stephen Ward's studies at Southampton University.


Risk and opportunity

Organisations can use some well known techniques to second guess what will be fashionable or will work (and those that won’t) using risk and opportunity techniques well established in other disciplines .

One thing we know is that risk and opportunities changes are dependent on complexity. If a programme is very complicated there is more to go wrong and online PR, with its range of platforms, channels and contexts, is quite complicated. But as we also know the opportunities for considerable incremental success is greater.




Fig 1. The relationships between complexity, criticality size and complexity

In most online interactions there are risks and opportunities. To manage them we need to identify them. This can be done by an individual, a focus group or management team or can be established from research. It’s a great opportunity for a brain storm with someone making notes!

In preparing a strategy for an online programme it is worth looking at where there may be influences that can affect it. In online interactions it is possible to second guess many, if not most, of the potential risks.

It is also possible to evaluate risk and asses its influence in terms of probability and impact.

An example might be that confidential information could leak out of the organisation and into the public domain because an employee has a blog or other social media presence. The risk evaluation team can come to a conclusion as to the probability and and impact and in doing so can list risks and the extent to which they are probable and or would have a significant organisational impact.

Having described risks and potential for effects, the organisation's PR evaluation team will asses each element in terms of likelihood of occurrence and impact. It helps put the risk or opportunity into perspective.

This is a technique used by many corporate and public sector organisations. It is the kind of matrix that might be used to assess risk for a PR campaign, school outing and is also used in project management.



Assessing the impact of events which can be estimated before any action is taken (now) and again after mitigating policies are proposed by the team, it will be possible to see if the potential if the risk is lowered (and acceptable) prior to implementation or exposure.

The process for mitigating risk is to create a mitigation (or contingency) plan, process or protocol to reduce either of both risk of likelihood or impact.

For example, to reduce the effect of an employee saying something our of turn in social media, a simple policy statement by the organisation distributed to all employees and a disclaimer by the organisation about personal views and opinions of the organisation's web site will reduce risk and often to an acceptable level.

Once a mitigation plan has been worked out, a new assessment is made of the likelihood or impact to see if the proposed actions for mitigation has had an effect that makes the risk acceptable.



These methodologies can be used in making all manner of decisions including the extent to which the internet should be made available during working hours (knowing that most people have access on their cell phones anyway). This structured approach helps inform such decisions.

Using such a process through each part of the planning process reduces risk to a manageable level and also helps to make precise projections of expected outcomes.

Risk management is a process and can be applied to strategy as well as tactics.





Of course, for each risk there is an opportunity. By applying the same technique but looking for opportunities and means to optimise such opportunities, the organisation can enhance the effectiveness of any approach to a campaign.

It is all too easy to imagine events in stark black and white answers. This is seldom the only solution and, as a result practitioners can work on contingency planning

There are a lot of techniques that can be applied to ameliorate risk, optimise opportunity and, written into the programme strategy using techniques adopted from other disciplines, PR can ensure greater certainty in online activities.



Disaster seldom comes unannounced for most organisations. There tend to be number indicators that presage the public event.

The key is to be able to identify the stages as they present themselves. They are:

Variation

All plans have expected outcomes, financial budgets and timescales. These are often identified using aids for project planning (see above).

Monitoring such plans will identify where plans are going awry. Often such occurrences are small. These are 'variations' to the plan.

Good monitoring will give teams notice that remedial action can take place and contingency built into the plan will calmly eliminate the risk and opportunity for escalation into crisis An example might be a contingency sum in a budget and some flexibility in campaign delivery time built into the PR plan.

Foreseen uncertainties

There are some variations that are identifiable and understood that the PR team cannot be sure will occur or when an under known circumstances it will occur.

 To mitigate foreseen uncertainties, the plan will need to include the capability to identify the event and a capability to deploy a pre-planned contingency programme.

An example (and not uncommon event)  might be unscheduled maintenance of a computer that is running the campaign blog. One big issue is website uptime (especially if a campaign is very successful) with issues such as a slowing of response times of the organisation's web site or, disaster of all disasters, the web site being so overwhelmed that it stops responding (in retail, this is the equivalent of the organisation's biggest shop being closed).

When a web site goes down, it is a PR problem. It is not an IT department problem. Risk analysis is critical in identifying and mitigating these events. Practicing for such events has to be included in any plan. Who does what, when and how and if they are not available or facilities are down who else should be included as part of such a plan.

Unforeseen Uncertainty

This kind of event cannot be identified during project planning. Or during risk management planning. There is no Plan B.

The team will be unaware of the event’s possibility or will consider it so unlikely that there is no in-built contingency plan. To be able to manage such events a comprehensive monitoring and alerting process is critical. Allis not lost, it is possible to have contingent plans in place to ensure that the right information (e.g. Information about internal manages and key issues management personnel, lists of journalists, bloggers, Twitter friends etc) is available and accessible (good idea to have it in the cloud so that it can be accessed in even the most dire circumstances) . There is a need to have alternative managers available if key figures are not available and of course many facilities can be put in place from 'dark' web sites to off site facilities to work from.

Unknown unknowns

Sometimes refered to as “unk-unks,” they make people nervous because existing decision tools are not available. Unforeseen uncertainty is not always caused by spectacular events or issues. They can arise from the unanticipated interaction of many events, each of which might, in principle, be foreseeable. The best management practice here is attention to detail and constant re-evaluation of the crisis and issues plan and its application.

Managing risk and online crisis is not very difficult. The hard bit is gaining commitment and resources to mitigate risk and plan for issues and crisis management.

There is also this very helpful process developed by Alison Clark for the joint CIPR/PRCA internet commission in 1999. The PR industry has had so many tools to help manage issues and crisis management for such a long time. Well done CIPR and PRCA!




In Brief:

• Many management teams are wary of the internet and many see it as a threat. For some there is no doubt that it is a threat and needs management.
• The sequence of events of online programmes can be easily disrupted by the online community.
• Plans can allow organisations to grasp opportunities and manage threats with tools that can be deployed at short notice.
• The practitioner can use some well known techniques to second guess what will be fashionable or will work (and those that won’t) using risk and opportunity techniques.
• Online PR, with its range of platforms channels and contexts, is quite complex. But the opportunities for considerable incremental success are greater.
• Risks can be identified and conform to a number of recognised variables.
• It is possible to evaluate risk and asses its influence in terms of probability and impact.
• Development of plans to mitigate risk before implementation will reduce threat.
• Risk management is a process and can be applied to strategy as well as tactics.
• There are a lot of techniques that can be applied to ameliorate risk, optimise opportunity and, written into the programme strategy using techniques adopted from other disciplines, PR can ensure greater certainty in online activities.
• Planning for programme variation, foreseeable uncertainties, unforeseen uncertainty and the unknown is possible and practical.

The strategic decision that can be made will cover the extent to which issues contingency planning will be part of the online activity.

The time and resource that will be devoted to issues and crisis management.
Who will be involved in issues and crisis management and that structured methodologies will be a applied.

Finally the strategy might consider how the organisation will practice contingency planning.

This post is relies extensively on the chapter on risk and issues management in the PR in Practice series of books, Online Public Relations a CIPR practice manual. Practitioners may also find Michael Register's book in the same series very informative.

Now we have another (practical) form of communication

Microsoft launched Kinect this week. It represents a new, practical and already available form of communication. It is part of what I have described as the Experiential Web.

Forget cave paintings, scrolls, books, letters, newspapers, telegraph, radio, phones television, the web and social media. They all require a mechanical interface. Now communication is possible just through movement.

Adopted and used by the PR industry, it can help the industry begin to achieve its full potential in this technology led era and should add a new and additional revenues stream.

I imagine that in two years there will be in excess of £250 million worth of PR fees connected with this single product alone and that it will grow the industry and significantly. I am not so sure that this will be the PR industry as we know it but it will definitely be PR and the first Kinect trained PR students will emerge into the market within a year.

Kinect's capability and application has a role in communicating with almost every organisational constituency.

No overalls, gloves, wands just a person going about daily activities can be involved in this form of communication.

How this is achieved has been talked about a lot already and it requires only a tiny imagination to see applications in almost every form of PR activity.

Mostly, Kinect is aimed at games and rather standard communication like conference calling but that need not deter the PR practitioner.

Just by having a constituent move in front of a sensor, the practitioner can now deliver a message, interact in real or virtual way and can engage directly. With its face recognition Kinect can deliver messages to people  based on no more than a photographic image (offering a whole new dimension for direct interaction with attendees at the corporate AGM, launch, political rally, press conference not to mention the retail outlet, sporting event etc).

To do all this the practitioner may want to partner with games developers like Scott Henson, at Rare who says:

You saw our big bold vision for Kinect when we rolled it out last year and now we’re going to enable that. It’s amazing to me how much we’re going to deliver to consumers at launch but we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do....

Kinect is not a game it is a new form of communication.

In response to Tom Watson

Dear Tom. It is very kind of you to comment in such detail and to explicate the work of Bournemouth University in such detail.

I am concerned that you or anyone can imagine that I could possibly wish to imply that any PR academic or tutor is somehow cheating students and agree that such a view would be offensive. I do know how hard they work, their dedication to students and some of the absurdities they have to put up with.

I recall attempting to up-date a module about internet mediated PR and finding (I was told) that there was neither budget (time) nor sufficient flexibility in the system to make this possible in the year when Twitter burst upon us with all its potential for speed of communication and news gathering. The university in question could not provide any time for research, preparation or course development over and above direct teaching hours.

Of course one still finds this is the case in other courses demanding utilitarian approaches to education.

My original post came from a comment I made on Stephen Waddington's blog in which I expressed amazement "that the CIPR could not even refer to its own publications and the work of Gregory, Theaker, Tench and Yeomans and others".  I might have added Watson & Noble and Malony etc all of whose work is evident (truncated and sanitised) in the document.

I am aware of the time it takes to develop such theory to guide practice which is a million miles away from the 'shoot from the hip' methodologies propounded by oh so many people offering ill considered quick fire answers to real issues.

The CIPR Toolkit borrowed extensively from such research which in now inculcated into much practice and the Toolkit and yet failed to recognise the contribution made by academia.

I have no doubt that teaching budgets are tight. That is exactly my point. This narrow view of PR is in stark contrast to other courses and I am sure you are more aware than I of this short sightedness.

As you may have noted from other posts in this blog, my view is that the PR industry is firing well below its potential for want of vision (and consequentially is  performing at less than a fifth of its true potential). 

I agree that, for a majority of students, the year placement is a very valuable experience and great preparation for industry as well as that crucial final year transition from learning to thinking.

As for the level of research, while applauding the work of BU, and I do within the constraints imposed, you must agree that PR research in the UK is pretty small beer. For an industry sector that had  (in 1995) and has today and will again have in the next evolution of communication,  the potential to contribute as much or more than the financial sector to the UK economy we have to do much better.

Twice in the last 15 years, I have suggested a route for the industry which it has ignored to its cost (at best £100 billion, at worst £50 billion) and we now have a much greater opportunity.

Stirring the industry is hard when its sights are set so low and its opportunity to excel is not rigorously explored   (and I am in admiration for the History of Public Relations initiative which is strategically important and notably so for the UK industry).

Rigorous research into such opportunities are few and far between especially when compared to, say, the financial sector or even (am I allowed to say it), marketing (now in turmoil as a discipline), business studies (which are so good that its pupils saw a search engine more capable of automating car driving ahead of the auto industry) and publishing (which has the exemplar of the Times Group which has more difficulty gaining a market (and revenue) that a 140 character iPhone App).

Having, controversially, opened the debate I trust that it sparks some interest among many more people.

Richard I am grateful for your comment. I think you are right in saying that PR degree courses are under threat (as I well know) because they haven't necessarily reached the size or maturity of other, easier to teach, disciplines.  We now have size (more PR’s than Journalists?) but I agree about maturity, which is my point. PR academia has yet to delve into the potential and yet is not investing in the research. It is seriously cheap for the universities. Can one compare the (relative value and) cost of DNA research to knowing more about the nature of relationships (one of many PR disciplines) in this war torn and often starving world.

Duncan, I am surprised to find your comments relating so closely to the arts of Her Grace The Duchess of Devonshire when your practice is promoted for rigorous research. But there is a solution. LMU used to have a skills course which taught the basic skills of PR agency. I hope you had an opportunity to employ them before the course was abandoned. 

Why does the PR industry ignore PR academics?

After a comment I made on his blog, Stephen Waddington, a candidate in the CIPR Council Elections, asked why is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? He notes that this is not the case in places such as Sweden and the US, for example?

Could it be that PR academics are wilting flowers? Is it that they follow rather than lead PR practice? Does this mean limited research that is none contentious? Is it the case that such milk and water teaching  and research reflects mostly recent (and largely American) history and is thus of so little consequence to the industry or are the reasons more profound?

Perhaps we should look inside the universities for its response. This is an era of rapidly changing platforms and channels for communication. Can the universities (and the PR industry) cope with the consequences? The hard science which explores the human brain to aid psychologist identify human drivers would seem to be beyond current teaching and hardly figures in PR courses or research. Computerised part of speech analysis which reveals semantically the values attaching to organisations and brands is becoming very advanced and yet PR academics seem to know so little about it. Access to technologies, that driver of human evolution, is changing the very nature of organisational structures and is better explored by other disciplines despite the obvious significance to PR practice. There are many other such issues facing all communications research. Have such changes pushed real PR beyond the limited wit of academia.

Maybe there is another reason. It is possible that the PR industry has been ripped off by academic administrators? The contribution undergraduate PR degree courses have made to Universities is huge. A real milch cow. Easy money. Cheap to run degree courses. Just under 200 PR students in one university contribute £600,000 from their own pockets every year. This means that diverted government contribution is funding other activities. This university is spending a fortune (£3.2 million) on teaching jobbing trades such as journalism, publishing, radio and TV.  Perhaps we await an academic who dares blow such a whistle?

Could it be that academia is truly frightened by the effort and (by historical standards very, very high) cost of the grants and sponsorship it needs to fund and execute ground breaking research for one of the key disciplines of modern management, namely Public Relations?

There could be a further conspiracy founded on the discipline taught in the universities being so threatening to the other institutions they dare not acknowledge the contribution? The PR trade association that publishes a guide that does not acknowledge its academic underpinning; the consultancy feeling more comfortable to provide safe haven for an ex FT journalist than a trained practitioner and the bank that employs a communications expert (even when provided with the evidence - PDF) is incapable of insisting that a breakdown in relationship and trust would lead to the collapse of the financial sector. These university taught practitioners are jolly dangerous folk!

Why, Stephen asked, is it that academics are so poorly reported or referenced by the UK PR industry? 

As part insider and part outsider, I think it is all these things and a few more. But the question still stands and perhaps, as universities re-examine their role, this is time for a proper and properly informed debate.

Why is the UK PR industry only achieving a tenth of its potential?

In the next two weeks the CIPR will elect its next president. Will the next one be able to look over the horizon or will the leadership in the PR industry continue to muddle along missing every opportunity on the way?

Poor leadership, lack of good research and timid practitioners have, and continue to, miss the big industry opportunities and, worse, re-enforce practices that may have a very limited future.

PR has to find some way out of its obsession with media relations. It is a reasonable question to ask if the PR industry is too big for the size of traditional media available. 

In the meantime, the industry turns its back on the really big opportunities.

In 1995, in response to a request to look 20 years ahead I spoke to the CIPR annual conference about the significance of the internet and suggested that the newly emerging World Wide Web offered a new and profitable communication opportunity for PR practice.

Today, the internet industry is worth £100 billion. If it were an industry in its own right, the internet would be nearly as big as the financial services sector, which accounted for 9% of GDP in 2009.

In 1999, I wrote Online Public Relations (first edition) saying that gaming as a form of communication was an important communications channel.  The economic contribution of the UK games sector is significant: in 2008, global revenues generated by UK video games were worth £2.03 billion, and contributed £1 billion to GDP.5 It is worth bearing in mind the economic contribution of the sector as an employer: the industry directly employed 10,000 people (and a further 18,000 indirectly) in 2008

In 2000, the joint CIPR/PRCA internet Commission made it clear that interactive online communication was a big opportunity for the PR industry. Ten years on, the tiny tip of revenue earnings from social media activity, advertising, was worth £2bn in the first half of 2010.

In 2006, I was blogging furiously about the content opportunities offered by mobiles.  This year the new communications platform, tablet and slate technologies, will achieve 20 million units sold while there were 346 million mobiles sold in the third quarter of 2010. These platforms are content hungry with associated App and content industries worth many millions.

There are many more examples of the PR industry failing to grasp the opportunities.

Perhaps the missed opportunity is a fraction of the above but at least half was within our grasp when the notion was first mooted. That is £52 billion and today the PR industry is, perhaps a tenth of that size and with the decline in print media, its threatened.

Why is the PR industry so reluctant to look ahead and learn enough to be part of these phenomenal opportunities for relationship building, content creation and take the centre ground?

Could it be that it is not able to bring together practitioner, consultant, futurologist and skill sets?

These are opportunities, not for the geeks and tech heads.  They touch on practices in politics, corporate affairs, internal communication and in every sector of enterprise.

It is about time that all the institutions including the CIPR, PRCA and the academics decided on a strategy that would inform the industry as to how it can and should thrive and grow over the next ten years.

This is all about money, big money and an industry at least ten times bigger than today.