Alaska Air’s Near Disaster Unfiltered…
I Hope Jeremy has big bandwidth and a big server because his account of the Alaska incident is scarry – and it’s going to attract zillions of eyeballs. Via Jeff Jarvis. Compare his account with news reports– some of which are featuring Jeff’s photos.
“Citizen Journalism” in action. Jeremy P makes a really interesting point that one lesson for any PR practioner facing a crisis is that you are going to need to manage transparency. It seems that Alaska employees are going nasty-comment-happy on Jeremy’s (the Jeremy on the plane) blog. Assuming he would never know I guess, they commented away. Jeremy simply looked at the originating IP addresses, which were from Alaska. And he was gracious enough to suggest that they might have been hackers using Alaska’s IP addresses. Not likely mate!
So, if your communications policy doesn’t cover commenting on blogs as an employee – then you might want to make sure it does.. and then make sure employees know it. And, if your crisis communications plan doesn’t feature monitoring of and communications with the blogosphere – better get on that as well.
Off to China
I’m off to China for a week. Gadling has a great pointer to Chinease blog sites – The China BLog List.
New Zealand
I’ll be back Friday and resume posting then. I’m staying with friends and high-speed is, well, non-existant. The view, wine and everything else is fabulous…
On the Road…
Kia Ora! Sorry for the lack of posts… I’m New Zealand bound having hitched a ride with friends on their Jet. This is definitely the way to travel… No high-speed at the Hyatt in Hawaii so this should be coming to you from Wellington, NZ.
Transparency = Accountability
Scanning through my RSS feeds, David has another post up on his Media Transparency Portal… He rightly points to one of the side benefits of transparency – accountability:
Although it doesn’t happen often, this was the second time in a week where my interviewee didn’t have the answers to some obvious questions. I don’t want to turn this transparency channel into a bitching and moaning session about poorly executed PR. While this again is an example of how a the practice of media transparency can be embarrassing to interviewees, the companies they work for, and their public relations representatives, there’s an upside. Transparency should make all three of those parties much better at what they do because they know that there’s more on the line than just the story itself.
That transparency raises the bar for everyone is an inevitable consequence of the kind of activities David is undertaking and recommending. Tip For Communicators:- Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. Or, in simpler terms, train your spokespeople. And where possible, use a third party – they’ll be less tolerant of internal correctness and lack the knowledge of your business necessary for asking obvious questions to which there are no obvious answer. [sidebar: in reading the transcripts for the interviews posted to David’s site, the one thing the interviewee does right is acknowledge they don’t have the answer and say they’ll get it]. I hope David keeps posting on this.
Two other transparency sites that are worth a look. First, Kent Bye at The Echo Chamber Project (who has an interesting post from the Social Networking Conference) and second, Jon Garfunkel. And, Fast Company has a somewhat goofy ethics monitor.
Rocket Fuel – FuelTV is taking off. Love it for the surfing and esoteric commercials. Definitely a channel to Tivo!
No Protection! Wired has an article by Media Hack – Adam Penenberg titled No Protection for Bloggers. The piece discusses if bloggers enjoy the same legal protection that journalists do. Adam points to State Laws, which have very clear definitions of what a reporter or jounralist is:-
Arizona says a reporter is someone “engaged in newspaper, radio, television or reportorial work, or connected with or employed by a newspaper or radio or television station.” Many of the other state laws all contain some provision that you must be employed by a newspaper, radio or television station. Getting the laws re-written to include bloggers is next-to-impossible.
The laws do need rewriting – definitions such as those found in Arizona are ludicrous in the post-Internet era.
Nihau From Jiuzhai
Thought I’d give you a quick update from the road. Am sitting in front of the fire in Jiuzhai – Ancient Tibet – they built a resort and airport last year so this is where we are holding our Sun Telco summit. Just called room service – they don’t know what Coke is but they recommend the spicy Yak meat and warm milk. Excellent! What’s even more amazing is that they have high-speed Internet in the rooms and my “JavaBerry” is sucking down email from our mail server over a China Mobile link.
You can hide from Coke but you can’t escape email…
