Today’s Wall Street Journal takes another in a recent series of looks at the way in which digital media is reshaping the way businesses manage their reputation and react and respond to their customers and stakeholders. Seemingly small issues online are combustible PR problems if not attended to properly, we are demonstrably warned over and over, and this article shows some companies doing the digital thing right.

Domino’s learned the lesson the hard way just a few months ago. But, it seems more and more companies are striving to avoid such a fate by ramping up their social media bona fides.

Coca-Cola is taking a step that, I’m guessing, might give other companies’ executives (and maybe PR staff) heartburn. Coke is rolling out a training program that will school marketing, public affairs, and legal staff on social media, allowing them to post to social media sites – in essence, represent the company on Twitter, Facebook and the like – without needing permission to do so. I think that’s smart, within reason.  

It’s smart because it recognizes the greater trend – we are approaching a time when every employee must be responsible to some degree for the reputation of their company. Reputation managers need speed and agility, need to be in a position to actually solve customer/stakeholder problems when warranted, and need to train others throughout their organization on what to look for online and how.

PR departments must empower colleagues to solve minor online complications on their own as they spot them. The digital world simply moves too fast and with too impossible a volume for a small team to mitigate every snag.

However, I do wonder how much is too much. In the race for companies to show how attentive and attune they are, are we forgetting the bigger picture? Does every complaining Tweet  - let’s face it, some can be downright silly – warrant a response? Part of the communications team’s charge is to help shape their company’s message and narrative for all the audiences that matter to them; to tell a unique but strategic story; to draw out into the light those qualities for which their brand wants to be known. Every Tweet must be made with that in mind.

Michael Sacks can be reached at msacks@mww.com

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On January 15th we witnessed commercial aviation history and saw first-hand the dynamics of crisis communications in today’s digitally-enhanced communications environment. 

Just before 3:30 pm Flight 1549 skimmed to a stop in the middle of the Hudson and immediately became the focal point of a squadron of news helicopters and scores of observers armed with every digital toy known to man.  Within minutes Tweets were flying, bloggers were posting and video was streaming across the Net.

Three hours later the ether was awash in coverage of Flight 1549 – over a quarter million Web pages highlighting the incident, several thousand related Twitter posts, nearly 3,000 stories from media outlets, over 400 blog posts, some 1,500 videos available online. ..all of this plus the expected deluge of coverage from traditional media channels.

The pace at which the news spread was as startling as the potential for catastrophic reputation damage had the landing gone differently.  What could have been a reputation nightmare for US Airways instead turned into something very different thanks to Flight 1549’s heroic pilot and crew.  As far as crises go, this was a “best case” scenario but few organizations get so lucky when crises hits.

Following the incident I wrote a white paper looking at the timeline of events during the early hours following Flight 1549’s miraculous landing.  From a communications perspective all did not go smoothly that afternoon and there is much to learn. You can download the white paper here.

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