Suspended animation

The Sir Robert Bond Papers and The Persuasion Business are in suspended animation effective today.

There will be no new posts for the foreseeable future. That's the suspension.

Old material  - in the usual animated style - is still available.  You can find posts through the archives list on the right hand navigation bar (scroll down a bit) or through google searches.

The Bond Store will remain open for those who are looking for great gifts or a way to show your contrarian nature on the beach or the golf course.

The reasons are simple.

First, it is a matter of time.  New projects will consume most of the time available to your humble e-scribbler over the coming months and work takes priority, right after family.

Second is a matter of how Bond Papers has always run. There's never been client business here nor has there been a discussion of issues related to a client. In the projects now starting, it will be difficult if not impossible to maintain the commentary on numerous aspects of public relations and public affairs without impinging on client affairs in one way or another. That's the more important reason behind the change.

Bond Papers is at a peak.  Readership remains high with over 11,500 readers each month and over 18,000 page loads. That's where it has been since early 2007. Readers include opinion leaders across the country but the bulk are opinion leaders within Newfoundland and Labrador. They may not think of themselves in those terms, in many cases, but they are.

It's been humbling to take a look each day at the traffic.  Thanks for your interest and for your feedback over the past three and a half years.

They will find other places to spend a few minutes each day.  Other blogs are available, like nottawa and labradore, to fill their need for a daily dose of pithy commentary and uncomfortable truths. If they want something a little saucier and considerably better written they can try Serious Business. If they like it straight, there are none straighter or more readable than Gary Kelly.

Public Ledger is back, for those who like Craig Westcott's take on things.  For the musings of another bastard, this time a townie, they can check out Craig Welsh's appropriately titled towniebastard. Both Craigs will not take offense at a little name calling.  The appellation is offered with greatest respect; both have earned that regard for different reasons.

Geoff Meeker is still highly recommended for those who prefer some discussion of media issues and some cross over to a discussion of public relations and communications.  Geoff may have inherited some things to get him started in his work but he has given professionalism a new definition both in his life as a journalist and as a public relations practitioner.

Other than that, there are simply too many good public relations blogs out there to recommend one or two over the rest.  Just google search and you'll get hits.

There are plenty of other blogs that focus on different aspects of life.  As much as people have tried to define or categorize blogs, each definition ultimately falls far short of what they are. Blogs are as varied in subject and tone and content as the people who write them. You will find a good sampling in the links to local blogs over there at the right. Blogs take work and thought - despite what some think - and blog writers are always appreciative of visitors. Drop in and check them out.  You may be surprised at what you'll find.

Blogging is a powerful medium and that fact has been proven numerous times across the globe. Influencing public opinion is the stock in trade of public relations practitioners and many have ignored blogs at their peril. The dearth of locally produced blogs on public relations or the dearth of local blogs on any subject that aren't privately and personally generated should give local communications practitioners cause to reconsider what they do. 

With all that said, readers render the final judgment.  If Bond Papers and Persuasion Business have proven valuable, even if  infuriating sometimes  - or every day -  then they hit the target.

The e-mail addresses still work if you need to vent or to make an inquiry. The comments sections will stay open for a short while, but the basic rules still apply:  take responsibility for your words.

Whether or not the suspension turns out to be permanent remains to be seen.

In the meantime, the last words are the simplest and the most heartfelt:

Thank you.

-srbp/tpb-

Changing the face of the news release

Compare this Ontario government news release with this example from the NewfoundlandLabrador government.

The traditional news release evolved from a print format news story. There is still tremendous value in the style, format and content if it is used properly.

The problem comes in situations where, despite drawing most of its communications directors straight out of news rooms, the overwhelming majority of provincial government news release are turgid, boring drek.  They may contain some of the most exciting and innovative ideas on the planet but the format in which the information is conveyed seems calculated to put people to sleep.

Now, sometimes news releases are deliberately written and distributed in a way to avoid telling things, but that's a whole other issue. Burying information is not communications; it's grave digging.

The Ontario approach breaks the conventions but it does deliver the information the government wants to convey in a way which people can take it up quickly and easily.  Reporters will likely find it easier as the starting point for putting their pieces together since it breaks everything down in tidy bundles.  The rest of us will also likely find it easier to scan and, frankly, that's the intention. 

With so much information coming in so many formats and through so many channels, people who want to stay informed have become browsers.

They scan.

Here's a heatmap picture [Source: Jakob Neilson's Alertbox] of how people scan web pages of different types. 

The red bits show areas of most eye activity.  Yellow is less activity and the grey bits are places where people don't look at all.

Some people spend a lot of time looking at these things since it tells us how to present information in a way that people will pick it up. 

Take a look at the web page you're looking at right now.  Notice that the posts - the things you should be reading are presented in the upper left, that is where all the red activity would typically take place. On the right are things that are considerably less important, not by the reckoning of your humble e-scribbler, but by the results of studies into the reading patterns of people just like you.

Don't worry, by the way.  You aren't being monitored, scanned or otherwise probed, at least not by this site.

Since people do learn to look to the right for other useful bits of information.  On the google page on the right of the picture, that's where those google ads appear with links off to some other site.  People spend a lot of time figuring out what attracts google attention in order to get a site into that red zone on the upper left.  Alternately, they just buy space on the upper right.

At Bond Papers, the stuff that the top of the right-hand column gets moved about a bit depending on what needs to be highlighted. The whole idea, though, is to put stuff where you are more likely to look so that you'll be more likely to see it.

The Ontario government news release doesn't really conform to this eye scan approach but it does at least reflect the shifting patterns in how people take in information.

Let's see if this idea catches on.  We shouldn't look locally or expect change any time soon, though, since the local market is fairly conservative.  The provgov's a good example;  the site only recently started posting photographs with releases and it's unimaginable that the provgov or one of its agencies would try youtubing stuff with decent quality video.

Doing more of the same when the environment changes makes it less likely your communication will be successful.

Take, for example, the campaign to promote composting.  Boosting the number of people composting successfully would require a shift in popular culture. The most effective way to do that would be through creation of a support network either within a physical community or through online communities and blogs.

Go find the official government composting blog.

Keep looking.

You won't find one.

That's because the project was approached as a typical flogging project.  We've got these bins and we need to move them out the door.  Therefore, run some advertising.  Print some brochures.  Find a price point at which the bins will move.

The key metric for success should have been the number of people composting successfully which in turn would reduce the amount of food matter heading for landfills.  Now the advertising mentioned the problem and how wonderful things would be if people composted, but nothing created the support system needed to actually have people composting.

The metric for success seems to have been the number of bins moved.

By that record, the project was a success.

Has anyone checked to see how many bins are not just taking up space in the corner of backyards?

Probably not.

But traditional news releases make wonderful fodder for a compost bin when you print them out.

In too many cases, that's about all they are good for.

-tpb/srbp-

Lords of the blog

Some members of the House of Lords are co-operating on a blog.

The official description:

Lords of the Blog is an experimental project to encourage direct dialogue between web users across the world and Members of the House of Lords. Commissioned by the House of Lords, the pilot project is conducted by the Hansard Society who are working directly with Members of the Lords to bring their blogs to the wider online audience.

Views expressed by the authors or ‘bloggers’ are their own and do not represent the views of the House of Lords, its authorities or its other Members (including parties and other groups of Members) or the Hansard Society.

There is a slightly more elaborate description.

If the notoriously conservative if not a tad eccentric crowd known as the British peers are blogging, then surely others will notice the value of frank, informal dialogue for government and business purposes.

-srbp/tpb-

Timely blog discoveries

Comprehension, the Public Relations Society of America blog.

crisisblogger, the blog for crisis managers and communicators.

-tpb/srbp-

Healthcare Crisis Public Relations - what makes a crisis?

While the specific details of a crisis may be unique, the fact that crises occur and need to be properly managed is a well accepted notion.

Many organizations have some sort of emergency or crisis plan for certain types of events and the literature on the public relations aspects of crisis management is wide. These tend to focus on natural disasters like fires or floods and in more recent times, organizations have become aware of the potential for manmade disasters like terrorist attack.

Oddly enough, there are more than a few organizations  - especially government ones - that seem to miss the examples of policy-related or similar crises and realize they fall in the same general category.

But if one considers the typical definition of a crisis from the crisis management literature, it gets pretty clear the problems at Eastern Health in 2005 fit the bill.  Take for example, the definition of "crisis" contained in Crisis communications in healthcare: managing difficult times effectively, a 2002 publication of the American Hospital Association's Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development.

A healthcare crisis is anything that suddenly or unexpectedly has adverse effects on a healthcare organization or its patients, staff or community. (p.7)

The book also contains a useful tool for assessing the type of crisis.  It's not an absolute system but it gives some idea of what the problem is and, as the book subsequently lays out, the sort of responses that experience shows work more effectively to:

• respond to the crisis;
• maintain or restore public confidence; and,
• restore normal operations.

The following table is adapted from the assessment tool with some wording changes to save space.

Assessing the severity of a crisis

	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3
Geographic scope/duration	Single facility or location	Affects more than one location but for short period	Affects org. or region for indefinite period
Impact on operations	Temporary. Confined to one dept. Normal operations restored within 24 hrs	Significant. Routine operations may shut down temporarily.	Extremely serious. Affected organization may be closed or operate indefinitely at fraction of normal capacity
Employee Involvement	Handled without many problems.  May divert from normal routine	Employees require support from senior management and may require external resources.	Level 2 + Total workforce involved. May need support of healthcare professionals from other organizations.
Regulatory, accreditation,law enforcement impact	Minimal concern.  Phone call or written report may be required.	Appropriate agencies will investigate and may sanction/fine. Sanctions are minimal to moderate.	Sanctions are serious: closure of unit etc.
Public Concern	Limited to parties directly involved in situation	Some public anxiety. Relatives of patients, community residents and others may contact hospital for information on an urgent basis.	Substantial public anxiety. Volume of calls strains normal capacity of organization.
Likely media coverage	Maximum publicity limited to one day of local news coverage.	Regional press plus trade publication.	National and/or international media interest. major newspapers, television, radio, magazines cover issue.

This table is by no means exhaustive nor is it complete.  There is some possibility for overlap from one crisis level to another, however, it is intended purely as a rough guide.  It doesn't have to be perfect.

For our purposes, though, it's interesting to take the evidence from the Cameron Inquiry to date and apply what was known in July 2005 by government officials to this matrix.

There's no question that what occurred at Eastern Health was a crisis.

Geographic scope and duration:  Level 3.  The laboratory problems themselves were confined to one site but their impacts involved patients from the whole province. While the start date for problems was identified as possibly being 1997, there was no indication of how long the problems might last into the future.

Impact on Operations:  Level 2.  The whole hospital wasn't shut but that section of the laboratory was.  Several departments were affected by the situation.

Employee Involvement:   Level 2.  External resources were required - outside labs - and there is no question that senior management assistance was needed in several ways to cope with the incident.

Regulatory, Accreditation, Law Enforcement:  Level 2/3.  There's not enough information to judge the potential impact of these problems on Eastern health's accreditation.  if we add to this section the potential for litigation from affected parties, this one becomes a Level 3 crisis.  A minimum of 100 people seriously affected, all of whom may become party to a lawsuit raises the potential of legal costs stretching into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Public Concern: Level 2 - Eastern Health clearly anticipated some anxiety and a volume of telephone calls from patients and relatives that may affect operations.  In practice, Level 3 - the incident caused significant public anxiety over a prolonged period.

Likely media coverage:  Level 3.  A story involving breast cancer, testing problems and hundreds of people couldn't be kept local if money changed hands.  It's big and everyone knew it was big from the outset.

Now that we've established that fairly obvious point, in our next posting in this series, let's look at a typical set of crisis responses and compare them to what senior officials at Eastern Health and the provincial government decided to do.

-srbp/tpb-

Healthcare Crisis Public Relations - what makes a crisis?

While the specific details of a crisis may be unique, the fact that crises occur and need to be properly managed is a well accepted notion.

Many organizations have some sort of emergency or crisis plan for certain types of events and the literature on the public relations aspects of crisis management is wide. These tend to focus on natural disasters like fires or floods and in more recent times, organizations have become aware of the potential for manmade disasters like terrorist attack.

Oddly enough, there are more than a few organizations  - especially government ones - that seem to miss the examples of policy-related or similar crises and realize they fall in the same general category.

But if one considers the typical definition of a crisis from the crisis management literature, it gets pretty clear the problems at Eastern Health in 2005 fit the bill.  Take for example, the definition of "crisis" contained in Crisis communications in healthcare: managing difficult times effectively, a 2002 publication of the American Hospital Association's Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development.

A healthcare crisis is anything that suddenly or unexpectedly has adverse effects on a healthcare organization or its patients, staff or community. (p.7)

The book also contains a useful tool for assessing the type of crisis.  It's not an absolute system but it gives some idea of what the problem is and, as the book subsequently lays out, the sort of responses that experience shows work more effectively to:

• respond to the crisis;
• maintain or restore public confidence; and,
• restore normal operations.

The following table is adapted from the assessment tool with some wording changes to save space.

Assessing the severity of a crisis

	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3
Geographic scope/duration	Single facility or location	Affects more than one location but for short period	Affects org. or region for indefinite period
Impact on operations	Temporary. Confined to one dept. Normal operations restored within 24 hrs	Significant. Routine operations may shut down temporarily.	Extremely serious. Affected organization may be closed or operate indefinitely at fraction of normal capacity
Employee Involvement	Handled without many problems.  May divert from normal routine	Employees require support from senior management and may require external resources.	Level 2 + Total workforce involved. May need support of healthcare professionals from other organizations.
Regulatory, accreditation,law enforcement impact	Minimal concern.  Phone call or written report may be required.	Appropriate agencies will investigate and may sanction/fine. Sanctions are minimal to moderate.	Sanctions are serious: closure of unit etc.
Public Concern	Limited to parties directly involved in situation	Some public anxiety. Relatives of patients, community residents and others may contact hospital for information on an urgent basis.	Substantial public anxiety. Volume of calls strains normal capacity of organization.
Likely media coverage	Maximum publicity limited to one day of local news coverage.	Regional press plus trade publication.	National and/or international media interest. major newspapers, television, radio, magazines cover issue.

This table is by no means exhaustive nor is it complete.  There is some possibility for overlap from one crisis level to another, however, it is intended purely as a rough guide.  It doesn't have to be perfect.

For our purposes, though, it's interesting to take the evidence from the Cameron Inquiry to date and apply what was known in July 2005 by government officials to this matrix.

There's no question that what occurred at Eastern Health was a crisis.

Geographic scope and duration:  Level 3.  The laboratory problems themselves were confined to one site but their impacts involved patients from the whole province. While the start date for problems was identified as possibly being 1997, there was no indication of how long the problems might last into the future.

Impact on Operations:  Level 2.  The whole hospital wasn't shut but that section of the laboratory was.  Several departments were affected by the situation.

Employee Involvement:   Level 2.  External resources were required - outside labs - and there is no question that senior management assistance was needed in several ways to cope with the incident.

Regulatory, Accreditation, Law Enforcement:  Level 2/3.  There's not enough information to judge the potential impact of these problems on Eastern health's accreditation.  if we add to this section the potential for litigation from affected parties, this one becomes a Level 3 crisis.  A minimum of 100 people seriously affected, all of whom may become party to a lawsuit raises the potential of legal costs stretching into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Public Concern: Level 2 - Eastern Health clearly anticipated some anxiety and a volume of telephone calls from patients and relatives that may affect operations.  In practice, Level 3 - the incident caused significant public anxiety over a prolonged period.

Likely media coverage:  Level 3.  A story involving breast cancer, testing problems and hundreds of people couldn't be kept local if money changed hands.  It's big and everyone knew it was big from the outset.

Now that we've established that fairly obvious point, in our next posting in this series, let's look at a typical set of crisis responses and compare them to what senior officials at Eastern Health and the provincial government decided to do.

-srbp/tpb-

The power of apology, part the second

Lawyers don't like apologies.

Perhaps they need to read more widely.

From The Intangibles, a public relations blog, a brief note with a link to an article from 2003 on the legal implications of apologies.

-srbp/tpb-