I recently wrote about some communications tips to remember when dealing with a crisis. Fortunately, not many of us have to contend in our lifetimes with the kinds of fiascos that made it into the Top 10 Crises for 2007 (from a communications perspective):
1. The winner was the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that surpassed our wildest expectations in terms of damage inflicted. While the media fanned the fire, the banking and mortgage industry failed to address either the concerns or any substantive solutions.
2. Chinese imports was a close second. From pet foods causing kidney failure in animals to lead discovered in toys, the Chinese government learned a hard lesson in the power of global communications to spread the word quickly.
3. BP and the demise of its CEO, John Browne, showed how quickly one can fall from grace through the lethal combo of company fiascos and personal problems.
4. The now-infamous story of Jet Blue keeping a plane full of passengers on the runway for 10 hours is a study in starting out with a too-little, too-late response, but then recovering pretty well with the CEO apologizing in every imaginable venue.
5. The shootings at Virginia Tech strained the university’s communications resources, but they ended up learning some tough lessons and rising to the occasion.
6. CEO dismissals at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch no doubt caused companies everywhere to examine their walk-away comp packages.
7. KFC/Taco Bell made the list for the dramatic footage of rats scurrying around its restaurant in New York. Enough said.
8. Whole Foods. As we all brave the new cyber world, these folks learned a tough lesson in terms of pretending to be someone else and posting glowing comments about themselves on the web.
9. Ribena was the GlaxoSmithKline drink that was marketed as having four times as much vitamin C as orange juice — until a couple of teenagers in New Zealand discovered that it contained practically no vitamin C. Whoops.
10. Finally, it was a year of still more sports scandals — from match fixing by a rogue referee in the NBA to a football star found guilty of running a dog-fighting ring to more baseball players on steroids (and lots of stumbling around on the part of various spokesperson).
Here’s hoping that 2008 will find us smarter, both in terms of what we do and the choices we make, as well as in terms of how to apologize and communicate our shortcomings when we make them.
