Crisis communications is something that we rarely think about until we actually need it. If 2020 has proven anything, it’s that a crisis can and will happen any time. Some examples may include, oh, I don’t know, Covid, or fires, or an injury in the winery, or a tank spill, or something along those lines. So how you react can be a make or break situation. So, it’s better to be prepared and think of solutions now rather than think of a solution later when you have to engage panic mode.
On today’s show, we chat with Doug Levy, who is a personal friend and an expert in this field. He’s written a book on the topic. He and I discuss what you should do before, during and after a crisis and really think about what we should do as an industry to prepare.
Without further ado, on with the show.
Transcript on Marketing Automation in the Wine Biz
Michael Wangbickler:
So, my next guest is a good friend and someone I highly respect. He’s spent his career in the middle of emergencies, bringing calm to chaos.
He’s been a firefighter and emergency medical technician, lawyer, award winning reporter, and communications executive at three top universities. It’s a pretty impressive resume.
In 2018 he published his first book titled “The Communications Golden Hour the Essential Guide to Public Information When Every Minute Counts”. So today we’re going to be talking about crisis communications, which is a topic that has proven quite important in 2020. So welcome to the show, Doug Levy.
Doug Levy:
Delighted to be here.
Michael Wangbickler:
Thanks a bunch for being here. So, crisis communications turned out to be something that I’ve been working on a lot in 2020, and I’m sure you have as well. So, let’s actually start off easy and let’s define what crisis communications is.
Doug Levy:
A crisis is anything that interrupts the normal flow of your day to day operation. It could be a physical emergency; it could be like a fire or flood or pandemic. It could be an information emergency where either a false story or an actual news story gets out about one of your executives or your property or your products, and you have to respond to that information issue.
It could even be something that has nothing to do with your own company or your own organization, but maybe your neighbor’s place burned down. That’s still a crisis for you, even if it’s not your crisis.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. So, you know, my assertion to all of my clients is that preparation is key when it comes to crisis communications. So, I think you probably agree. So, what are the things that people can do to prepare for crisis’s before they actually happen?
Doug Levy:
I think number one is don’t freak out. A lot of people don’t have crisis plans because they think it’s a big deal.
And the fact is, the planning that you do to be prepared for a crisis is part of what you should be doing to run your business anyway. Everything you do to prepare for a crisis will make your business better. It doesn’t take away from things you should be doing anyway. So that’s the starting point. And then the next part is just think about what has to happen when there’s an emergency. You can’t prescript every scenario and you shouldn’t. That’s a waste of time.
But in every emergency, you’re going to need to have somebody authorized to make decisions. You’re going to need to know how to reach people. You’re going to need to know who’s got the password for the Twitter account or the social media feeds, who can change the website, how you’re going to operate if people can’t physically get into the same place.
These are all issues that can be and should be and must be thought through in advance. If you don’t, you may have no way of dealing with whatever’s happening.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. So, I often go through that process as well with clients, and, you know, one of the one of the most important things is, is to make sure that your spokespeople are trained to respond to crises. So, like, what are your suggestions on that process?
Doug Levy:
This depends on your audience. Part of emergency planning is really thinking through who needs to hear from you right now? So if you’re in the wine business, you have your employees, you have your investors, you have your customers, your distributors, your retailers, restaurants, your individual consumers, your neighbors, government officials, regulators, every one of those is an audience. Depending on the situation, one or more of those audiences may be more important than the other.
You have to have a process for figuring that out and then making sure that you’re getting the right message to the right people at the right time. Part of that means having people who know how to do that. You know, you don’t want a random person talking to your state lawmakers, but you don’t necessarily need the chief executive to be doing all that either. You should think through and train, practice is really important.
Michael Wangbickler:
Training and practice, absolutely. So, would you advocate for designating kind of a crisis team within any company?
Doug Levy:
Depends on the size of the organization. I think these days what’s really important is everybody at every level should have familiarity with what your company considers a crisis and understand that there is a procedure for responding.
It’s very important that, you know, whether it’s the most junior person all the way up to the top, knows, “hey, I saw social media message that you know about a problem with one of our products, who should I tell?” You don’t want things like that to be ignored, but you also want to make sure that whoever is handling it is handling it the way that you want your company to be reflected.
So, in some cases, that’s just an alert system internally.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. So how do you… I often find that that’s where things break down, is that, you know, the person on the ground isn’t trained or informed well enough to actually have the responses, so they start running around panicking and trying to figure out, like, who to talk to. So how do you suggest that companies communicate this? How do you suggest companies prepare for this?
Doug Levy:
That’s a great question, and in fact, some of the most horrendous failures that I’ve seen have been organizations. There was one where there was a very well-developed plan, but it had been circulated by email and nobody had ever practiced the plan, and there wasn’t even a meeting to talk about the plan.
It’s like literally the leadership team distributed it and thought that was all they needed to do. Unfortunately, a real emergency happened, and it went very, very badly. Everything that went wrong would have been addressed in the plan if anybody knew that it existed.
So, the big documented plan is not the important thing. In fact, a good a good crisis plan should probably fit on an index card. It’s mostly who to call and when.
So, awareness of what is a crisis is absolutely the most important. Understanding that it is not the sort of thing where these crisis people come in and take over, because that’s not going to work either.
You have to have everybody able to pitch in if there’s an emergency.
So, yes, you want to have specialty training for the folks that are going to be on camera, absolutely should get some specialized media training geared toward your emergency plan.
Michael Wangbickler:
Absolutely, yeah.
Doug Levy:
But everybody at certain levels should at least be able to jump into the other roles, because if there really is an emergency, you may not have all the right people where you want them and you’ve got to work with whoever you’ve got.
Michael Wangbickler:
That’s an excellent point. I can almost guarantee to you that there’s a lot of… Especially winery’s there’s breweries out there that that are prepared for any kind of crisis, you know, and things happen, you know, tanks rupture, injuries on the floor happen.
Those are things that I’ve all that I’ve run into throughout my career in the wine business, not infrequently, which is kind of sad. But in almost every case, people just don’t really know how to respond. What else should people consider when putting together the plan?
Doug Levy:
It’s hard to absolutely believe this until you live it, but many organizations have crises and come out better.
Michael Wangbickler:
That’s true.
Doug Levy:
I’ve seen even hospitals where bad things have happened, but they’ve wound up with more community support, a better reputation because of how they responded effectively when something bad happened. Small businesses have an edge because most small businesses I mean, you’re with your neighbors, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got competitors that are your friends, you’re part of a community
Michael Wangbickler:
Frenemies.
Doug Levy:
Exactly. But that’s something that can work to your advantage, provided that you operate with integrity. If you embrace the bad situation and deal with it, it’s always going to be better than ignoring it, thinking it’ll go away.
One of the reasons that my book is called The Communications Golden Hour is that the way organizations react to whatever the crisis may be, in the initial minutes almost always determines whether they will come out the other end with a good outcome.
And I and that that actually refers to both, you know, lives and property as well as reputation. That doesn’t mean you need to be like telling everybody all the details about what happened. In many cases, the first thing you’re going to say after an emergency or when an emergency happens is, “hey, we just got the report, we’re looking into it, we’ll get back to you”. But you’ve acknowledged that there’s a concern.
Michael Wangbickler:
Mm hmm.
Doug Levy:
And especially if you’re in a larger organization where you have a lot of employees, communicating about a crisis to your internal team is critically important and so frequently forgotten.
Michael Wangbickler:
Well, internal communications in general is often forgotten…
Doug Levy:
That’s true
Michael Wangbickler:
…in a lot of large corporations.
Doug Levy:
The best way to prevent a crisis is to have an internal team that understands who you are, what you’re doing, and what the company stands for, and the more that you have people feeling like they’re connected, the less likely you are to have a problem down the road.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. One of the things that you cover in your book, and something that you’ve kind of established a reputation for, is using social media as a communications tool for crisis communication. So how did you come about to that, and like, how does it work?
Doug Levy:
It started, I guess, in the early days of Twitter when the police department at the university that I was working at the time was trying to figure out how to improve their communications.
And they were going to create a whole new system. And as I worked with them to understand what they needed, which was mostly they needed a way to let people know, you know, evacuate the building, or stay away or whatever. Creating a separate system was not going to work, especially in the environment that we were working in. So, what we needed to do was find out where were the people we were trying to reach already engaged.
And at that time, Facebook was dominant, Twitter was emerging, and it was pretty easy to figure out that Twitter was going to be a pretty effective way to reach a lot of people very quickly. So, you find out where your audience already is, and you go there.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, I mean, Twitter really emerged as a news vehicle, like during the Arab Spring, you know, issues of several years ago and today, you know, I kind of view it as mostly used for that. You know, it used to be just kind of inane conversations with folks, but now there’s a lot quite a bit of important information, news and, you know, for that matter, brand information shared on that.
Doug Levy:
Absolutely, and it’s also a place where you can kill your brand if you’re not careful. There are quite a few crises that result from an errant tweet.
And that’s something that should be part of your crisis planning. In fact, you know, how are you protecting your Twitter handles and so on. But Twitter is absolutely the best vehicle right now for official information to get to the news media. It is also a tool that the news media uses to reach people who have information, whether they’re officials or others.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Doug Levy:
So, you have to look at Twitter. You can’t count it out even if it’s irrelevant to your brand marketing. Twitter is an essential channel for emergencies, no question about it. Facebook is complicated, and may or may not be useful.
Michael Wangbickler:
So then would you advocate that like somebody is, like, always monitoring the Twitter feed for a particular company?
Doug Levy:
Monitoring social media, for brand mentions, or other key words that are important to you is probably a good idea. What’s nice is that there are a lot of tools to make that mostly automated, and I think it would be wise for every organization to do that.
I think in particular, when there’s an emergency or any kind of a crisis, you step that up and actually have a live person monitoring social media. And in fact, the last live fire incident that I was involved in, I had exactly that. I had one person whose only job was social media listening.
Michael Wangbickler:
So, then you can respond quickly to anything that comes up, because often times people start to fill in the gaps on their own.
Doug Levy:
Exactly.
Michael Wangbickler:
Misinformation, yeah.
Doug Levy:
You want to you want to correct misinformation, but the reality is that in many emergencies, you may get information from the outside faster than from the inside or official sources.
So, if you’re really trying to find out what’s going on, you at least need to be aware of what people outside are saying. They may be wrong, but you need to know.
Michael Wangbickler:
So, OK, so let’s say that that first kind of hour of the crisis is passed, and people are starting to figure out what it is that needs to be done or has been done.
So, what are the next several hours look like? I mean, you know, a crisis just doesn’t end, right? You know, crisis is ongoing. So, like, you know what do people need to do or prepare for that?
Doug Levy:
So, there is a difference between a crisis that is sort of a one moment thing, because then you’re probably going to be into recovery phase maybe eight hours later, maybe sooner, maybe a little bit longer.
If it’s a long duration emergency, like covid-19, that’s a whole other ball of wax.
Michael Wangbickler:
Very true.
Doug Levy:
Which challenges people under any circumstance. First thing is to make sure that you are addressing actual hazards to life or limb. Or property. So, are your people safe? Is your property safe? Are your customers OK? That should always be at the top of the list and you’re not necessarily going to have that resolved in the first hour.
Hopefully in the first hour you know who’s responsible for that. After that first hour… So in the first hour, you’ve acknowledged that something’s happening, you’ve provided whatever information is verified that you can, you’re clear about whose emergency it is – because that’s another way to create a crisis where you don’t need one… If you wind up giving information that isn’t yours to give out, you may open up a situation that you really don’t want to be involved in. If it’s a fire across a community, your job is not to tell people what the boundaries of the fire are, or where people should evacuate to.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Doug Levy:
Your responsibilities, your property, your employees, your customers. What do they need to know?
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Doug Levy:
We’re closed because the roads blocked off for the fire equipment. Stay away. And you’re going to have a lot of that in the subsequent hours, but you need to be… You know, once you get into that second hour, you do need to start thinking about, “OK, what do we do to clean up from this? What do we do to recover? How to… What’s going to need to happen before business resumes as normal? Are there repairs? Are there people who need to be hired? Is there some official process that has to happen?”
Figure those out. Those may or may not be part of your communication, but you do need to know about them because you don’t want to put out a statement saying we’re going to be open tomorrow, if you have regulators who are going to come by and say, “yeah, your building’s condemned”.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, that would definitely be a bummer. So, I mean, you know, that’s a great point, and so… in addition, you know, I’ve noticed that people tend to like gum up certain channels where, you know, things might be important to communicate, you know, like using a hashtag that maybe the first responders are using to inform people of doing something, but other people are using it to, like, spread information that might not might not be correct and or might, you know, be inappropriate for the timing of that.
Doug Levy:
Well, that’s also where some advance planning is a good idea. So for one thing, if you’re in an organization, a company where crises happen, hospitals, fire departments, police departments, you know, any kind of government agency, those are all entities that, you know, the business is crisis.
So, you can actually pre-plan for some of those scenarios. And the key part there is people should know ahead of time where to go to get information.
And it could be go to Twitter and follow this hashtag that you’ve preplanned. But you made a really important point. You don’t want to just glom onto whatever hashtag other people are using. That may or may not be helpful for you to achieve what you need to do in an emergency. Is your information relevant to everybody? It might not be.
Michael Wangbickler:
OK, so going back to the idea of cleanup, you know, it was one thing to actually go through the process of doing that, then, like, how do you do follow up? How do you communicate? What process should there be? For instance, like let’s say, you know, you want to have a statement for the media, or you want to inform the media of what really happened and tell your side of the story.
Like what, you know, what would you suggest for that in terms of like, OK, you’re in the midst of cleanup or you’re getting past that, and like, when do you then communicate and how do you communicate?
Doug Levy:
Early and often. I mean, the truth is that if you don’t tell the story, somebody else will and they’ll usually be wrong, and it’ll be damaging to you. So, you must control your story. You do that by telling people your story.
Again, it doesn’t mean spilling the beans on something that’s going to wind up in court someday. But you must have a lawyer who understands the difference between business preservation, reputation management, and protecting your legal responsibility.
I’ve worked on plenty of cases where, yeah, we’d win in court, but we wouldn’t have any customers because the position we’d have to take to defend the suit would be absurd. Yeah, it costs money, it sucks. There’s a lot…
I mean, hey, you know, I went to law school, I’m licensed in Maryland, but there are a lot of lawyers who are happy to file frivolous lawsuits. It’s a real problem in our country, it’s the reality. Your communications decisions have to made with that in mind, you don’t want to create liability where there is none, but you also…
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah. So, an attorney should be involved in your crisis communications.
Doug Levy:
Absolutely. You need to preplan for who must see the communications before it goes out, and whoever’s in that chain has to understand you don’t get three days to review this. You get maybe three minutes because it has to be quick if it’s a real crisis.
And this is also where choosing the really right words is important. When I’m working with law enforcement and, you know, this is the mentality in law enforcement, so it’s usually not too heavy a lift to get people to realize that the statements have to be factual and without anything else, so…
Michael Wangbickler:
Without editorializing.
Doug Levy:
Without editorializing and without jumping to any conclusions. “Officers arrived on the scene and found a deceased man with what looked like a gunshot wound”. Facts.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Doug Levy:
Not talking about how the person got shot.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Doug Levy:
Which has to be part of an investigation.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. Coroner has to let people know how it went and all that.
Doug Levy:
Yeah, and, you know if you’ve got… Let’s say you’ve got a product recall, there are plenty of situations where you need to – or the prudent thing to do is a recall, even if it’s not legally required – you do it because it’s the right thing to do. How you describe what you’re doing is really important. Both because you want your customers to trust you, and you don’t want to be creating liability where it may not properly rest.
Again, I’m not giving legal advice here, but giving the facts is usually safe. “Out of an abundance of caution, we’re recalling the product. There was a report of a tampered package we’re investigating,” or “the authorities are investigating, we’re doing the recall just to be sure”. You’re not saying there was a tampered package.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. You’re saying there appears to be and we’re doing it.
Doug Levy:
We had a report of.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. Yeah, so in many cases, I think that, you know, we all have the inclination to want to respond to something like instantly. I mean, that’s the kind of society we live in right now, is that everything has to be instantaneous. But it’s OK to tell people or reporters saying, “we’re looking into it, we’ll get back to you”.
Doug Levy:
Absolutely. Acknowledge – acknowledge the concern or the question, because the absence of acknowledgement is what will get you into trouble. But never speculate. What I try to get people to do is literally within the first five minutes of a major situation, should be your first communication.
You know, if your police department officers are responding to a report of an incident at whatever, please avoid the area. You don’t even say what the incident is because you don’t want to create alarm until you have an idea of what it actually is.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right.
Doug Levy:
You know, same thing with companies, it’s like you know, “we’re getting calls about our new product, we’re looking into it – stay tuned”. And then, of course, you have to be sure to come back with the information.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, that’s the key point, isn’t it? OK, so, hey, this has been a great conversation. Before we before we wrap up here, do you have any closing thoughts? And also, if you could share, like, how people can get a hold of you?
Doug Levy:
Happy to. So I think what this year has proven for us all is that crises of all kinds really can happen to any of us or all of us, and the more you think ahead, the easier it’s going to be. And again, it’s not exhaustive preplanning. That’s not – I mean, you know, there are probably consultants who sell huge projects – that’s not necessarily what you need.
But you do need to think ahead, it will make your business stronger. And I mean, this is my favorite topic, so if anybody wants to find out more about my work, I’m at douglevy.com, and I hope to hear from people and…
Michael Wangbickler:
And your book is available there as well as on Amazon.
Doug Levy:
And actually, you can order it from your favorite local bookseller.
Michael Wangbickler:
Excellent. Excellent. So, my friend, thank you so much for being on, this is something that we’ve been exploring a lot lately internally at Balzac, and so I appreciate you chiming in and giving your thoughts on this.
Doug Levy:
It’s a really important topic.
