Chief financial officers have dealt with auditors since the days of the abacus. Smart chief technology officers bring in friendly hackers to test the ability of firewalls to withstand cyber attacks. Facilities managers conduct evacuation drills.

However, aside from airlines and a few industries susceptible to high-profile incidents, it is rare to see mandated, periodic reviews of a company’s crisis communications plan.

Update with care

For organizations that have a mandatory annual review of their crisis communications plan, the task may be relegated to a junior staffer who lacks the skill or authority to make major changes. This is a mistake.

A rubber-stamp process that simply updates staff phone trees and media lists is dangerous because many of a company’s newest communications channels and techniques to reach stakeholders could be missing from a legacy crisis plan.

Many PR professionals used 2009 to experiment with social media, speaking with influential audiences directly rather than through one-way messaging with the help of mainstream media gatekeepers. The numbers told the story: As Facebook surged past 350 million unique users, a record number of daily newspapers folded in 2009, plagued by a deepening recession and debt.

As organizations of all sizes began building social media communities, their dalliance was often short-lived and lacked scale. Other organizations have proven that they are worthwhile enough to earmark significant marketing dollars.

Any 2010 crisis communications planning needs to consider an organization’s new social channels — whether on internal networks like Jive Software andYammer or externally via platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Learn from others’ crises

Following the devastating January earthquake in Haiti, communicators who used social media channels not only reached customers and brand loyalists, but also reached influential mainstream media. For instance, when American Express waived fees for merchants accepting earthquake-assistance donations, the company found that their tweets quickly made their way in news coverage.

Pleas for doctors and nurses to help in Haiti also spawned rumors that American Airlines and JetBlue Airways were flying medical personnel to the ravaged nation. Within minutes, the @jetBlue Twitter feed, which has attracted an astonishing 1.5 million followers, dispelled the misinformation and directed would-be volunteers to an organization that validates credentials of nurses and doctors willing to help.

Of course, the nature of social media is that everyone is a publisher. Because consumers can generate content that is sometimes incorrect — or, worse yet, deliberately disparaging — organizations that embrace social media must be extra vigilant.

If left unchecked, third-party postings and comments on the wall of a brand’s Facebook fan page can spread rapidly and become amplified by a social media influencer or a mainstream outlet. The damage can be immediate and profound.

Use your own channels

Brands that are proficient in distributing their own content — from simple tweets to polished thought-leadership white papers, webinars and videos — should ensure that their fans and followers know about critical news as it happens. Waiting hours or days to comment leaves room for rumor mongering and speculating.

As we’ve learned from mature social media programs, like the one run by Ford Motor Company’s Scott Monty, the crowd generally accepts that instant answers are not always available during a crisis. Monty and his staff have earned respect from fans and followers by promptly replying, even if the Ford response is something as innocuous as, “I just read your tweet and am looking into the situation.”

For fans, just knowing that someone is on duty and moderating the channel may be enough to calm the frayed nerves of an angry consumer.

But being awake and in touch via social media channels is not enough to keep a corporate reputation intact while under siege. It’s one thing to promise a reply and something quite different if no one in senior management is willing to go on the record in social media, just like in mainstream print and broadcast. An organization’s social media team should have access to senior communications executives to address the issues of those making noise online. Common sense should dictate whether to do this outreach publicly or privately.

Tone down commercial content

On Sept. 11, 2001, my office window in New York overlooked the flashy billboards in Times Square. The brands advertising their wares in lights just two miles north of the World Trade Center should have been unplugged immediately. In reality, it took a day or two for most of the signs to go dark or for advertisers to replace them with appropriate messages of sorrow, charity or patriotism.

Just as airlines have long enforced a policy to immediately pull their ads from TV and print after any major crash involving a passenger plane, brands using new media must have a kill switch built into their crisis plans.

It was hurtful to see animated beer ads on Broadway on Sept. 12, 2001. As crisis communications plans are created and updated, it’s critical to remember the many consumer touch points between a brand and its publics: the Web site, ad campaigns, events and pre-scheduled company announcements unrelated to the crisis.

Stay aware, active

While I don’t know of a magical solution that lets a company’s entire marketing program instantly switch off, there are powerful tools to prevent gaffes within the most widely used social networks. Among the features that apply to crisis situations:

• Moderation consoles that capture posts and comments, matching them against “black lists” of words and phrases that an organization may not want on its Facebook wall. These tools also display comments made to pages that are only weeks or months old, eliminating the possibility of disparaging content being buried deep within a fan page. An “escalation” feature allows questions posed by fans to be e-mailed to experts for faster responses.

• Page management tools to schedule the publication of content in advance. Some crisis scenarios can be anticipated, so approved responses can be loaded into the tool for faster responses. These tools also let administrators suspend campaigns without the intervention of third-party vendors.

• Self-service application dashboards allow organizations to publish customized content quickly for their Facebook page. Using these tools, a company, agency or nonprofit could quickly move from a sales-oriented page to one that distributes information about an incident or engages fans to support benevolent nonprofits.

Many of today’s consumers gather information in real time. This can lead to big rewards for organizations that learn to behave like media companies, attracting an audience and then earning trust by communicating continuously through the good times as well as the bad.

(I wrote this piece for PRSA’s monthly newspaper, “Tactics.“  It was published in the April edition.)

PR Week was kind enough to make me a guest blogger for the week of SxSW.  Like any reporter, I captured more material than I was able to use.  Here’s some interesting happenings that caught the eye of my faithful Flip:

Check In For Charity — Use of the location-based social network FourSquare was central to a promotion at SxSW to benefit Save the Children’s Haitian relief effort. Porter Novelli worked with StudioGood President Chris Noble, interviewed here, to execute the campaign, in which Microsoft and Paypal contributed 25 cents for each check-in on Foursquare in Austin during SxSW Interactive. As of March 14, the goal of $15,000 had been achieved.

FourSquare — Tristan Walker chatted with me about FourSquare’s involvement in the http://checkinforcharity.com benefit for Haitian children, and how organizations can work with his company on similar campaigns. Walker also addressed the competitive energy at SxSW between FourSquare and Austin-based Gowalla.

Move over Facebook Connect. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams used his keynote speech at SxSW Interactive to demonstrate how the micro-blogging platform will integrate more easily with third-party web sites.

A key benefit of the new @Anywhere platform is the ability to follow people directly from web sites they visit. Web site owners will see additional “tweets” about their content, said Williams, adding that the inclusion of Twitter’s full stream of public content on Google, Bing and Yahoo has allowed users to find relevant information more easily.

“There are 50 million tweets a day,” Williams told a packed auditorium in the Austin Convention Center. “You may see 100 of them. But are they 100 that will really help you out?”

Using a short video to demonstrate @anywhere, Williams said launch partners will include The New York Time, Amazon, Salesforce, eBay, the Huffington Post, Meebo, Yahoo, Advertising Age and Digg.

Among the features is the generation of a “hover box” that appears when visitors to a @anywhere partner sites mouses over a bold-faced company name or the byline of an author. With one click, and without leaving the partner web site, users can add that individual or organization to their Twitter followers list, said Williams.

The SxSW session used a slow-moving interview format, with no input from Twitter users or audience members, resulting in a steady stream of people exiting the auditorium as well as a online complaints from Twitter users.

A sampling:

@omarg: “How dry would you like that keynote? REEEAAL dry?”

@MattSummers Half expecting the moderator to ask @ev his favorite color

@jackiehuba: Just heard sirens outside. Too late to resuscitate this keynote

@daniel7720this has fail whale written all over it

Every industry has its own vocabulary.

“ANFO” was lingo I learned in my first PR agency job, writing a monthly column called “Shot Rock” for Pit & Quarry magazine.  My account was a commercial explosives business that had been spun off from DuPont, and ammonium nitrate was a mainstay for blasters.

At UPI, articles we promised to write for newspapers were called “skedders,” because they were scheduled ahead of time.

PR Newswire loved to refer to its clients’  heifers.  It was newsroom lingo for “HFR — Hold for Call.”  Nothing to do with cows.

So when I took on my first operating role since leaving PRN, I expected that I’d have to learn a new vernacular.  Context Optional, where I’m vice president, strategic accounts, has developed many of the most popular branded applications on Facebook. Clients include Clinique, Target, OpenTable, Microsoft and the U.S. Census Bureau.

I’m no newbie to Facebook. But it isn’t until you look beyond your “wall,” “news feed” and “live feed” that you realize how damn confusing the platform can be for anyone — let alone a brand — trying to harness the power of the medium as a way to attract and engage fans.

Facebook does have a sales team to work with deep-pocketed consumer brands.  Often, though, CMOs want to do more than advertise to create a tighter bond with online consumers.

That thirst for engaging content has created a nice business for the select few who understand the always-changing technical underpinnings of Facebook and the rules concerning user privacy and best practices.

The fact that Context Optional has earned the coveted “Facebook preferred developer” label is just a starting point.  It’s my job to bring my new colleagues’ API-driven creativity to those marketing and PR pros charged with attracting and retaining fans and followers, and to do it in a manner that achieves business goals and is culturally acceptable on Facebook.

So I’m learning about the differences between canvas applications and apps that live on tabs.  I’m diving into Facebook “boxes” and trying to understand why they are about to be discontinued.  And just when I was starting to forget about the investor relations profession’s nightmare transition to the financial reporting language XBRL, I am told that Facebook code is written in FBML.

Luckily, the fans of Einstein Bros Bagels don’t have to worry about any of that to get a coupon for a free bagel and schmear.  All they have to do is click on the “free bagel” tab.  My new employer has handled the back end integration with Facebook to make this special offer work.  My guess is that the fan base will soon be well north of today’s 22,000.

The 548,000 fans of Chanel were awarded this week with the option to download screensavers that display the time with two vividly recreated J12 timepieces.  Budget-wary teens were given a fun set of viral “Stop Me From Spending” tools.  Still other soon-to-launch apps are aimed at Valentine’s Day, the Vancouver Winter Olympics and even a mobile phone texting competition.

Needless to say, I am having a ball working with brands to creatively earn the right to have a relationship with consumers on the Facebook platform and beyond.  Just forgive me if I don’t yet know the difference between a poke and a nudge.

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(Note:  I remain an active board member at dna13.)

There’s something special about a guy who isn’t a rock star yet has three times the Twitter followers of Bob Dylan.  He’s not a deep-pocketed electronics retailer, yet his social media presence dwarfs Best Buy.

Jeremiah Owyang is an influencer in Web strategy, a futurist, a gadfly and — most important of all — someone who listens, studies, engages and shares.  A partner in the newly formed consulting firm Altimeter Group, Owyang earned his nearly 60,000 followers the hard way.

Since I dived into the social web after leaving PR Newswire, I found that Owyang’s Forrester research reports provided a well-grounded reality check that validated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, marketing methodologies and the demand for new PR and marcom tools.  He’s routinely quoted by CMOs during conferences and, unlike many celebrities, @jowyang almost always tweets back immediately.

During my recent visit to Altimeter Group’s new headquarters in San Mateo, California, Owyang showed no signs of being jet-lagged, despite returning less than a day earlier from one of his frequent overseas speeches.  He also demonstrated keen knowledge of an increasingly confusing vendor community supplying social media monitoring, analysis and curation tools.

To illustrate why the public relations industry should familiarize itself with social customer relationship management systems, Owyang shared an anecdote about how appliance maker Whirlpool  failed to appease a disgruntled customer, and the damage it caused due to that customer’s ability to influence millions through social media.

“Customers do not care what department you’re in,” said Owyang, predicting that some forward-thinking companies will take on the challenge of building smart systems that inform Support, PR, Marketing, Product Development and offer a single view of the customer no matter where they touch the company.

I am aware of one large food manufacturer whose PR department is heading into the new year with amped up monitoring capabilities and a plan to pipe real-time data into their customer service call centers.  If the readers of PounceNow are aware of organizations where PR is embracing the challenge, please comment on this post.

My former boss had a funny line to describe how often the owner of a mid-sized New York investor relations agency showed up at free media breakfasts:  “He’d show up to the opening of an envelope.”

These days, any exec who attended the plethora of events aimed at professional communicators would be hard pressed to get their work done — assuming their job wasn’t eating rubber chicken lunches in hotel ballrooms and attending tweet-ups.

Barely a day has passed since I finished reading tweets from those attending the annual research symposium of the Society for New Communications Research (whose SNCR acronym is pronounced like the caramel-nougat-peanut candy bar) outside Boston.  Now, some of those very same techie flacks are heading to San Diego for the big Public Relations Society of America conference.

But wait, we’re not through yet. Thursday marks PR Week’s NEXT event in New York City.  On Nov. 12, 18 and 19, Steve Etzler’s  Business Development Institute is holding three separate forums.  Before the month’s out, there’s even a PR Camp in New York, the brainchild of Atlanta comms veteran Dan Greenfield.

I’m pretty sure the above list doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of autumn events designed to provide professional development — and a nice revenue stream for organizers.   Other organizers who do a quality job with educational events include  Women in Communications, the International Association of Business Communciators, National Investor Relations Institute, Mediabistro and Infocom Group.

The unprecedented fragmentation taking place among publishers, industry associations,  entrepreneurs and ad hoc groups involved in PR means there’s plenty of idea sharing and peer conversations taking place at these events.  The sad reality, though, is that many would-be attendees have to hold down the fort because of a lack of adequate staffing and a downhold on corporate travel expenses.

Anyone who wishes to see the PRSA action in real-time should keep their eyes on Twitter posts with the #prsa09 hash tag as well as a live video stream from dna13 on Monday, November 9 starting around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time.   This free access to the conference can be found at http://blog.dna13.com

By Alice Fong,

Business Editor, The Ticker

On Oct. 15, four leaders in the public relations industry spoke in a panel dubbed “The Changing Dynamics of Public Relations” at Baruch College. The event was streamed live and Twitter comments were projected in real time.

The industry leaders described how the public relations industry has changed, and the course it will take moving forward.

The conference was hosted by Baruch MarkLab, a resource center that connects Baruch students and marketing industry professionals.

The panel discussion was webcast live and open to Twitter comments and live feedback from the audience.

Dave Armon, former president of PR Newswire, a provider of information distribution services, moderated the panel.

The panelists reflected on the change that the public relations industry is currently undergoing.

“Change is tough for everybody,” said Jeff Gluck, a leader in external communications for the General Business division of IBM, “The industry is going through tremendous change right now.”

He cited the recent sale of BusinessWeek magazine to Bloomberg LP.

Gluck remembered receiving public relations information through the mail. Now the public relations industry has moved to the web.

“Digital communications is name of the game,” said Don Middleberg, founder and CEO of Middleberg Communications, “my clients would rather be in BusinessWeek.com than in BusinessWeek.”

Yet mainstream media still has “an extraordinary amount of influence in catalyzing the conversation,” said Peter Himler, founder and principal of the New York media consulting firm Flatiron Communications LLC.

A provocative business story in mainstream media reverberates in the public.

This news in mainstream media is seemingly magnified through Twitter. Twitter functions in a similar way to PR Newswire or Business Wire for companies.

It allows knowledgeable individuals to disseminate information to interested parties.

“Now, it’s not about mass; it’s about niche,” said Middleberg. “Employees can become ambassadors and take that load off of the internal communications department,” said Himler.

This is a change from how information in the public relations business used to flow. “PR people played an integral role between the newsmaker and the news reporter,” said Himler, “it was always top down.” Public relations would work with their clients to make sure that they advanced their media agenda.

Now the content on blogs and Twitter feeds bypass the media filter.

“All of a sudden, the newsmaker has a voice in what ends up in editorial domain,” said Himler, “People’s media consumption habits have changed…it’s no longer top down.”

However, the goals of companies have not changed. “Every company, every institution still wants its brand in the media,” said Himler, “only the means to that end have changed.”

Technology, such as Google news alerts, now enables public relations companies to follow what people were saying about their clients. Bill Southard, founder and CEO of Southard Communications, is active in trying to understand what is going on with the company’s clients.

“We’ll do ongoing competitive analysis for our clients,” he said.

Public relations started in the early 1900s with “press agents,” paid individuals who tried to influence journalists for various interests. This sparked the rivalry between public relations people and journalists.

Middleberg suggested that the public relations industry is a great business.

“It’s a great opportunity to come in and be a sharp, smart strategist right now,” said Middleberg.

To succeed in public relations, Gluck suggested hard work and preparedness.
“Be selective about whom you follow, and read tweets that interest you,” said Middleberg. He looked for academic leadership and intellectual curiosity.

“Think about your resume and what’s going to ‘pop’ there,” said Himler. “Go out and play with these [web] tools, then put them on your resume,” said Himler.

Personal branding is also very important in the business. “You can’t stand too many bad stories that are your doing,” said Gluck. Students should aim for “a brand of integrity, a brand that stands for something,” said Middleberg.

Middleberg offers an internship to Baruch students at his firm, Middleberg Communications, on what he calls “McDonald’s wages.”

The panelists cited paid or unpaid internships as a way for interested students to get a foot through the public relations door.

Chocolate’s in the news today.  If Cadbury is gobbled up by Kraft — or Hershey or Nestle for that matter — how would that impact you or your clients?

With gold surpassing the psychological barrier of $1,000 an ounce, eBay reported 14k gold was the “biggest mover” today.   Not surprising, similar action is being seen on Craigslist. Investment advisors and consumer protection agencies should be having a field day.

The United Nations General Assembly is preparing to meet in New York September 15.  If your organization is gathering at the same time, can you draw parallels and attract attention?  Or maybe you have some wonderful gridlock-busting technology you should be showcasing in Manhattan during the mayhem.

Look out Conference Board, The Economist claims its Big Mac Index is an accurate financial indicator?  If you represent a global product or brand (and don’t mind calling attention to market-by-market pricing), challenge the sandwich to a duel.

Friday marks eight years since the attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington. Is there a tasteful angle that points to ways you or your clients are dealing with the memory of the attacks, helping the families of victims or contributing to a safer world?

Red hot on Twitter over the past 48 hours are thousands of postings under the heading “When I was little, I…” Does this data reveal anything useful? Any emblematic kids’ products or insightful parenting authors want to jump on the bandwagon?

September is when thousands of green interns arrive at PR agencies to make a substantive contribution.  Too often, they are told to organize messy stacks of magazines and newspapers or validate media lists — anything to keep them from jeopardizing actual client work.

If you feel like trying something new — even beyond monitoring calls for help via ProfNet and HARO –  challenge your interns to establish a real-time assignment desk of sorts?  Have them monitor what’s happening right now, not events that occurred last month, last week or even during yesterday’s news cycle.

Very few agencies look at early social media indicators to predict what stories will spill over into mainstream media in the coming days or weeks.  Those who do often look only for specific keywords, like their clients’ and competitors’ brands, personnel and hot issues rather than taking a blue-sky approach that invites more creative connections to less obvious events and topics sure to command media attention.

By training the interns — and potentially a more experienced in-house staff of  “war room” news hounds — to use readily available, free Web resources, they can surface trending topics and match them against issues your clients are facing.  Account supervisors and management could hold a huddle each morning or afternoon to review what the interns have discovered.

Key to making this work is understanding the type of expertise you can offer influential bloggers and media covering a given story.  Are there experts within your client’s organization who could be interviewed? Do you have b-roll or digital photos to illustrate a point?  Is there any current research that could be summarized and distributed?

Any smart PR agency pro knows that this kind of approach could backfire if an ill-prepared client expert is powdered up for hastily prepared CNBC interview only to bomb on-camera.  Advance media training and content development are key. So is production and digital warehousing of media assets that can serve as sidebar material to amplify the points you’ll make in writing and on-camera.

Many of us continue operating as though year-old editorial calendars, quarterly account reviews and weekly client-agency conference calls are adequate to maximize opportunities — and minimize risk  — in a new generation where user-generated content contributes to a more fluid and often volatile online presentation of hot topics and news.

The new crop of interns might just teach us all something if given the chance.

The shooting death of a Kuwaiti businessman this past weekend is a sobering reminder of how wrong things can go when misinformation is used to pump up stock prices.

Whether Hazem Khalid Al-Braikan killed himself or was murdered isn’t the point.  What is clear, no matter how the CEO of Al Raya investments died, is that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had frozen his assets because of suspicious and potentially profitable trading that occurred just before the release of news on a bogus tender offer.  (Read the full account here)

The credibility of time-sensitive, market-moving corporate news is central to the smooth operation of our global equities markets.

There’s a place for humor, such the ongoing spoof between Apple and Google on the BBspot blooper site and other venues clearly marked as parody.  But the biggest trusted providers of financial information — Dow Jones, Reuters and Bloomberg — are fighting an increasingly difficult battle to screen out bogus data from legitimate news on their closely watched platforms.

Hats off to astute newsroom staffers who rejected the fake release concerning Harmon International and Textron this past weekend, having questioned why those  NYSE -listed companies would not have issued their statements over PR Newswire or Business Wire.  Phone calls and faxed releases from Kuwait were deemed suspicious.

BW’s Neil Hershberg, a former colleague of mine at PR Newswire, noted today that we are approaching the one-year anniversary of an odd SEC statement that gave corporations the green light to experiment a bit more in the way they disclose their material news to investors.  During the past 12 months, the vast majority of companies have continued to broadcast their full-text news to the media, investors, employees, customers and other audiences via the security-obsessed commercial newswire services — ranging from industry stalwarts Business Wire and PR Newswire to Nasdaq’s Globe Newswire and the upstart Marketwire — rather than risk raising questions about the authenticity of their information.

Certainly, some innovation has taken place: 

• Ebay supplemented its use of BW with Twitter to snap highlights during the company’s quarterly conference calls
• Nasdaq-listed BGC Partners, Inc. issued a short statement over PRN saying its earnings release had just been posted to its website.  The downside of “notice-and-access “release is that investors have to take an additional step to download the company’s data, and opening additional browsers is potentially slow and cumbersome

As the C suite and investor relations officers strive to stand out from the crowd — especially when the economy begins to grow again — there will be new models and exciting ways to share information.  High atop any list of possible disclosure solutions should be the question, “Will investors trust that this information is legitimate?”