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09.26.07
Dark Blogs: Bad Idea For Crisis Communication
By Shel Holtz
More and more, I hear communicators counsel their organizations and clients to maintain a "dark blog" in the wings, ready to be activated in the event of a crisis.
Whether this is actually a good idea falls into that "it depends" category.
Blogging software, stripped of the elements that make it a blog (like comments and trackbacks), can be used to provide rapid updates as the crisis progresses through its various stages. If that's the intent of a dark blog, fine.
If, however, the dark blog is designed to provide a genuine, authentic voice engaged in conversation about the crisis, this is an awful idea. The blog will have absolutely no credibility. It will have no established voice. No community will have formed around it.
Establishing a corporate blog before a crisis, on the other hand, allows an organization to build community along with some banked goodwill and trust-assuming the blog is done right in the first place. That storehouse of goodwill and trust can be used in a crisis with an audience already inclined to believe what the corporate blogger says and, to some extent, to support the organization in its trying time.
Consider the minor crisis Southwest Airlines experienced when the ejection of a scantily-clad passenger from a flight became public. Imagine starting a blog in order to engage in a dialogue with the customer base and the flying public over the issue.
Instead, Southwest Airlines President Colleen Barrett used the existing "Nuts About Southwest" blog-with its regular core group of readers and its established credibility-to issue an apology:
We always want to apologize if we offend any of our Customers, and we also support our Employees abilities to make decisions. We are apologizing to Kyla, in typical Southwest style, and I hope you will click here to read about it.
The post was greeted with more than 140 comments (as of today). While the comments represent a mix of opinions, they are mostly courteous and well-thought-out, the way people talk when they are engaged in a conversation with someone they know. The ability to engage directly with those whose opinions are strongest can defuse a lot of the hostility some people may feel. The fact that they can do so on a company blog makes people feel like their opinions matter to the company. And a number of the comments do applaud Barrett for the apology, like this one:
While I think this apology should have come much earlier than it did, I'm glad to see that SWA has apologized for it's error, and publicly admitted to the mistake.
Good job!
It does make sense to include social media-and, at this stage, blogs in particular-in your crisis communication planning. If you're looking for an argument to support introducing a corporate blog, the benefits of two-way communication with critical audiences during a crisis could help you sell the idea. But don't fall prey to the suggestion that launching a blog at the time of a crisis is a sound strategy.
Comments
About the Author:
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
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