Dan Criscenti hadn't counted on managing e-communications for a crisis of international proportions when he signed on with Ford. Criscenti's initial role with the venerable
auto manufacturer was to improve the efficiency of the company's internal Web site. As manager of new media communications, he spearheaded "Model E," a program intended to give
all employees access to the Internet. When the Firestone crisis raged onto the scene, however, his job description changed.
Today, as he considers the role new media played in the response to the Ford/Firestone crisis, he describes Ford's success as "a lesson in preparedness." If the corporation's
Internet and intranet infrastructures had not already been in place, he suggests, things might have played out very differently.
Criscenti now serves as director of business development for TEKgroup International Inc., a technology company developing software solutions for the PR and marketing
communications industries. As corporate crises erupt on a near-daily basis, PR NEWS spoke with Criscenti about his experience with Ford and the lessons he learned about the role
of electronic PR in a crisis.
PRN: Tell us about the new media work that was done at Ford prior to the Firestone news.
D.C.: When I signed on with Ford, one of the first things I saw was four people in a fairly decent-sized room literally clipping newspapers every morning. Starting at about 5
a.m., they would clip the papers, rubber-cement them onto a sheet of paper, make copies and then hand-deliver or fax them to executives.
We saw that there was a better way to do that by leveraging technology, so we created an online clip sheet and started it in 1998.
When Firestone hit, that clip sheet became one of a number of useful bits of information that were reviewed and analyzed in a multi-disciplined war room that Ford had created,
with public affairs people and engineering people and safety people.
That's not to say that Ford does not have a number of other electronic resources - they have news feeds coming in from a number of places that could have been gathered and
analyzed. But the clip sheet streamlined the process and made it so much more efficient.
The clip sheet also allowed this news to be spread throughout the Ford organization, via the Ford intranet.
PRN: Tell us more about the intranet's role in the Firestone-related PR.
D.C.: The mission when I was hired at Ford was to make public affairs a paperless organization, and while we never did get paperless, we did wholly change the way public
affairs handled documents on a global scale. In addition to the clip sheet, we created an intranet site for public affairs people, one that could only be accessed by all the
public affairs people, so that any document that was created by a public affairs person anywhere in the world would be submitted into this intranet site.
So, for instance, if a reporter called about a Firestone issue or any other issue and a public affairs person needed a response, they could simply call up an informational
brief about that topic and essentially read it off to the reporter. In that case, the message would be uniform: There would be a single voice coming from the company anywhere in
the world.
One of the issues that people always talk about in a crisis is the need to make sure you have a fairly small team leading the communications around that crisis. What this
Intranet did was to allow that small team to continue to lead, while also supplying this uniformity across the company throughout the world.
PRN: You raise an important point about consistent messaging. But that doesn't just pertain to the media - in a crisis, all stakeholders should be receiving the same
information. How did technology help there?
D.C.: The most visible tool was something we called "media manager" which is a very robust online newsroom. All the information on the media manager is on a database, in a
template that replicates the Ford.com template. So, when [consumers] came in through Ford.com, they were hitting the exact same material as the media. All the information that was
published to media.ford.com was exactly the same as what was on Ford.com, except that each site had its own look and feel.
PRN: How can PR professionals prepare their own digital resources in order to make them most effective if a crisis does strike?
D.C.: There are a handful of things that you want to look at in that sense. The most obvious is traffic levels and where traffic is going. But, of course, if you have a crisis
situation going on, you can almost bet that you are going to have a spike in traffic. So, what is more useful is to understand what information journalists are most interested in
getting at.
At Ford, we created a couple pieces of functionality that would tell you that. We had a function called "article counts" that would count the number of times any particular
article is viewed. It also told us which journalists who have registered at the site had viewed those articles.
There also was a bit of search functionality we created. First, we would capture journalists' search criteria, so that we could have an idea of what it was people were coming
to the site for. Then we would use another technology to take that search criteria and guide them to the information we thought they were looking for.
It allows you to give people very quick and easy access to the information they are looking for, which is what they want, and at the same time it gives you a very clear idea of
what people want from your site and allows you to make best use of that information.
(Contact: Dan Criscenti, 734/222-5422, [email protected])
Single Source
Keeping the Web-surfing public up to date on the Firestone crisis meant creating a single content engine that allowed communications execs to publish that content to multiple
sites. The site was created within 35 hours after the Firestone crisis broke. "That was no minor chore," Criscenti says. "It was two or three people at TEKgroup staying up for 35
hours to put it together."
In the two-day period after the recall, Ford's Web traffic underscored the importance of e-comms. The company saw:
- Nearly 150,000 unique user sessions
- More than 463,000 page views
- More than 7 million hits
- Around 27.5 million kilobytes of data transferred