Even Worse Than We Had Hoped
By Paul Spelman
Quoted in article about dealing with the media
HR Magazine, August, 2009
by Eric Krell
The sandwich makers in the YouTube video reportedly said it was a mirthful prank, but the leaders of Domino's Pizza weren't laughing.
They clicked into crisis response mode last April following a video that showed two North Carolina-based employees gleefully violating health code standards while handling food. To stem the damage to the Domino's brand, Patrick Doyle, president of Domino's
While some media relations specialists said Doyle's response was about a day late and he lacked eye contact with the viewers, his action demonstrated what company leaders, including those in HR and corporate relations, should be ready to do when their organizations get potentially harmful media attention. Doyle delivered a strong, straightforward message--in the same medium where the problem had cropped up.
The original video might have dented Domino's revenues, but it was no cause for cheering by any competitor. "It had a negative effect throughout the food industry," says Susan L. Harmansky, SPHR, a senior HR director with pizza retailer Papa John's International. Some restaurateurs were concerned that consumers might turn away from fast food in general after seeing the original video.
Such social networking permits customers and employees alike to quickly exert influence on organizational reputations. Harmansky and her colleagues have since begun clarifying their company's communications policy to help ensure that it covers social networking communications as effectively as possible. Leaders in other HR departments are taking similar steps to adapt.
Crisis management and social networking make up only some of the challenges to HR leaders' media relations skills, however. It's also important for HR managers to know how to handle reporters' inquiries about more-common business matters such as layoffs and mergers and to understand the objectives of various media outlets. And sometimes, HR executives can take their stories to the press.
Proactive Media Relations
At the Motley Fool, a multimedia financial services company based in
"The interviews emphasize that the work culture there is self-starting and self-sustaining," says Sean Dougherty, a New Jersey-based media relations strategist who has worked for a firm that provided PR services to Motley. The story isn't about a company with "off-the-wall policies," he continues. "It is about making a workplace where management and employees treat each other with respect and maturity and don't get hung up on whether someone took 21 days or 22 days of vacation in a year."
Refining HR's Role
Dougherty says executives in other HR departments can, like the ones in Motley Fool's, take a proactive approach toward working with the media. "Particularly when companies are between hard-news events such as product launches, mergers, earnings announcements and senior executive moves, articles on innovative ways the company manages its employees, handles vacation time, uses hoteling to reduce its real estate costs, rolls out an environmental campaign and so on can create positive messages."
HR leaders should hold regular meetings--monthly, if possible--with their companies' internal public relations teams to discuss emerging issues and policies with consideration toward developing publicity, Dougherty adds.
"Think about where your employees communicate externally and what you want them to be able to do and not do," Dougherty says. "Call a meeting with the internal public relations and legal teams to discuss jointly what policies would legally get you there. Write an overview of what you want the final policy to look like." Finally, he adds, consider bringing the policy to external PR or media relations experts to "track your outline against best practices and emerging legal issues."
In most organizations, the public relations or marketing professionals typically lead media relations, yet "there are advantages to having the HR perspective represented in media relations planning and responses," says Cindy Raz, SPHR, HR partner with EthicsPoint, a Portland, Ore., firm specializing in ethics and compliance issues. She says HR leaders should identify the process for fielding, evaluating and responding to media requests.
In many large companies, all press requests must go through and be evaluated by public relations specialists. For example, the request to interview Raz for this article went to EthicsPoint's external public relations agency, Edelman, and from there to Bill Piwonka, EthicsPoint's senior director of marketing.
Piwonka requested background information from Edelman, including a summary of the article and the exact questions that the author planned to ask, and then he "evaluated the impact, positive or negative, that participating in the media interview could have on our company."
Opting to move forward, Piwonka checked with Raz to make sure she was willing to do the interview, and he "helped her prepare by providing background information on [the] story and helped identify examples that might be of interest or useful to demonstrate proof of what was being discussed."
Raz, who had worked in human resources for public relations agency Waggener Edstrom, admits that her preparation was relatively brief, given her experience.
Social Media Principles
An emerging media relations challenge for employers, of course, is employees' social networking. "It has opened up so many issues," says Rita Vogel, director of human resources at Accounting Management Solutions in
The evolution of organizational "social media relations" is just beginning, says Brad Phillips, founder of New York-based Phillips Media Relations and a former producer for CNN and ABC. He says communications departments should take responsibility for authoring social networking policies with support from HR and legal departments. The policies, he suggests, "should not be overly restrictive and may veer more toward statements of principles."
That's the approach at network technology developer Sun Microsystems of Santa Clara, Calif., currently being purchased by enterprise software giant Oracle of Redwood Shores, Calif. More than 4,000 Sun Microsystems employees blogged last year, including CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz. They were guided by a policy that essentially says if you aren't supposed to tell reporter something you want to blog about, don't blog about it.
The "social computing guidelines" at IBM, based in
Companies frequently go in the opposite direction, and that's a mistake, Dougherty says. "Some companies just say, 'No blogging about work' and rob themselves of an incredibly valuable free marketing asset."
IBM's policy continues to evolve, according to the company's guidelines, and features a blend of principles-based guidance--"respect your audience" and "try to add value," for example, and rules such as "You must not comment on confidential IBM financial information such as IBM's future business performance, business plans or prospects anywhere in the world."
Putting an external communications plan in place is only the beginning. To conduct effective communications through an organization, its spokespeople must understand the wide variety of media and discussion topics. Preparing a video to post on YouTube is vastly different from responding to a business magazine's interview request.
Not All Media Are Alike
And interviews on potentially controversial HR-related issues may require a nuanced understanding of the media, says Paul Spelman, a former TV reporter and author of the forthcoming book Even Worse Than We Had Hoped: A Journey through the Weird, Wild World of Local TV News (Meshomac Press, 2009). While he says the majority of reporters do not have an ax to grind, "the press simply cannot handle a vacuum. If the company won't help fill the void, the media will fill it with someone else's side."
Consider layoffs, for instance. They usually take place after a management team concludes that workforce reduction is necessary to remain competitive. "Reporters and the public can understand this if you tell it to them in a straightforward manner," Spelman says. "But if no one at the company will talk about why layoffs were necessary, what the alternatives were, and what sort of options laid-off workers may have, then the media [are] left to focus solely on the plight of the laid-off personnel, and the company ends up looking heartless. ... There are situations where legal and privacy concerns require that certain details not be released. But there are ways to give the media something [they] can write about even while protecting the company and its employees."
The objective of participating in interviews, media relations experts say, is to remain on message. Company spokespeople, including HR professionals, should prepare for all interviews by identifying messages they want to convey.
It's not "media manipulation," Phillips says. "It's an exercise in talking about what the organization is really trying to do. Staying on message means answering questions and then using examples and data to remain within the framework of what is important to you and the organization."
Accomplishing this requires interviewees to think beyond the questions coming their way--and even beyond their questioners. "You're speaking through the reporter, not to the reporter," adds Phillips. He tells clients that while they're responding to a reporter's questions, they should picture a person in their audience whom they want to reach.
The stakes are high for companies facing tough media questions about predicaments, but there is a silver lining for those who stay on message. "Studies have shown that companies that deal with crises poorly lose value," Phillips says, "but companies that deal with crises well actually gain corporate value."
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