Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

A few minutes ago, I logged onto my Twitter account (mostly to see what I could see) and saw a tweet about today’s incident involving US Airways flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson River following some sort of trouble prior to or shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia.

In less than 10 minutes, a Tweetdeck search for “US Airways” has turned up nearly 1,200 different tweets related to the incident, meaning that reports—both accurate and inaccurate—are making their way around the globe.

Let’s all pray for the souls on board.

And for the good folks at US Airways who need to activate the crisis page on their Website NOW.

Your current crisis communications plan is worthless, thanks to camera phones and You Tube.

Just ask Bay Area Rapid Transit General Manager Dorothy Dugger, who’s dealilng with the aftermath of a shooting at BART’s Fruitvale station in Oakland in the wee hours of New Year’s Day, in which a transit police officer was captured on cell phone video (allegedly) shooting and killing 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who lay subdued and unarmed at the time.

In the old days (when the only video of the incident would have been from the BART surveillance cameras), Ms. Dugger and her response team would have had a head start on crafting their response to the public.

But cell phone videos of the event were quickly e-mailed friend-to-friend and later appeared on You Tube. CNET.com reported earlier today that one such video, uploaded by KTVU Channel 2 in Oakland, has been downloaded more than half a million times since Monday.

On Wednesday, a protest near the Fruitvale station turned violent, resulting in more than 100 arrests and significant amounts of property damage.

Credit BART for providing up-to-the-minute updates, including videos of subsequent board meetings, background on proper police procedures and updates that can be sent directly to the recipient’s e-mail or wireless device.

But by the time they even had a chance to formulate a response, their reputation had already been tried, found guilty and burnt at the stake by an angry mob, and it’ll take years for the BART police to re-earn the public’s trust. And then there’s the matter of the $25 million wrongful death lawsuit filed by Mr. Grant’s family.

Think Rodney King on steroids and you know what the City of Oakland is going through right about now.

What plans have you made to protect yourself from a similar fate?

How deep is your reservoir of goodwill with the publics you serve?

How quickly are you prepared to leverage technologies such as Web-based video, You Tube and Twitter to counteract the flood of negative images when it all hits the fan?

Barbara Shelly has a commentary in today’s Kansas City Star that almost makes me feel sorry for the impending demise of our fair city’s daily fishwrap….if it weren’t so completely clueless.

Shelly claims that as a cub reporter she once saved the business of a Syracuse fish-monger whose business had fallen prey to uban blight. When confronted by Lois La—ERRRR—Shelly, the frustrated store owner launched into a bottle-throwing tirade that gave her the sensational words and pictures she was after.

Although Shelly’s commentary eventually gets around to the very valid point that newspapers have long performed a much-needed public service, her anecdote clearly illustrates what PR types have long known, and what recent consumer behavior confirms: just because it’s in the paper doesn’t mean it’s “news.”

As I mentioned last week, The Star’s inability to support itself has less to do with the paper not performing its civic duty as it does with the fact that other media do a better job of delivering the same or similar information (such as national and international news and features).

How to keep the business of “journalism” a going concern?

Shelly proposes “charging consumers to download content from the Internet, creating niche publications that command enough ads to subsidize news-gathering” (and boy, isn’t Ink doing a helluva job in that capacity?) or “switch[ing] to [a] non-profit, foundation-supported ownership.”

Or they could find a way to report the news that would attract readers (online and on-dead-tree) that would in turn drive advertising revenues.

My guess is that they’ll cling to the old ways and watch their business make the long slow spiral crying, “but what about the fraying of our community connection?” all the way down the drain.

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research is possibly the most prolific Tweeter and blogger out there today. All of his stuff is worth reading, provided you’re willing to give up every other activity in your life.

Last week, he touched on a cautionary point for all corporate bloggers: consumers still don’t trust you.

In fact, corporate blogs rank DFL on the list when consumers were asked, “how much do you trust the following information sources.” The top three sources? E-mail from friends (77 percent surveyed trust e-mails from friends as being trustworthy), consumer product/service reviews (60 percent) and Internet search engines (50 percent).

A measly 16 percent of consumers believe corporate blogs.

The basic gist of Owyang’s commentary on this report is that bull$hit is bull$shit and no amount of technology can save you from the backlash that comes when you talk AT people and not TO them. (Actually, the backlash begins when it becomes clear you weren’t listening to them in the first place.)

Your customers don’t care about you. They care about themselves. So quit taking up bandwidth banging your own drum and start figuring out what your customers truly want to know.

Forrester devised a handy method called POST (people, objectives, strategy, technology) for companies communicating in cyberspace. And it’s a pretty good guide for any marketing communications strategy, regardless of whether you’re interacting with cusotmers online or face-to-face.

An interesting front page piece in the Kansas City Star on the dismal state of the newspaper industry, with all sorts of “sky is falling” copy despite the fact that the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (editor’s note: more “pew” than “excellence”) reports that newspaper pretax profits last year averaged a robust 18.5 percent.

While many decry the death of the daily newspaper, a study published earlier this year by the Associated Press portends a shift in the way that news is vetted, reported and edited that could lead to a new era of prosperity for the newspaper industry.

The Associated Press report, “A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption,” examined the habits of consumers ages 18-34 in three American cities, the UK and India.

The study found that many young people (and presumably some of us older folks as well), are not entirely blown away by the way that news organizations have pretty much adapted their old style of reporting to new media.

However, some news organizations ARE evolving with positive results.

The UK’s Daily Telegraph, has completely overhauled the way it runs its news operation, with amazing results. “In a year’s time, the Telegraph has become the third most-visited Website in Britain—17 million unique users visited Telegraph.co.uk in March 2008, compared to 7.2 million in March 2007,” reports the AP study.

By adapting a broadcast-news style structure in the news room, the Telegraph has created “a simple-to-manage news strategy: headline first (via any available communication method—SMS, e-mail, phone call), followed by a 150-word brief, and within an hour, a 450-word multimedia story. Following that, assigned editors decide whether to commission analyses, opinion peices, additional multimedia, etc.”

Their Website enables visitors multiple entry points for a given story, as well as multiple avenues to interact with news content and each other, or to explore topics of related interest.

The print edition has essentially become a “greatest hits” version of what appears online.

Which brings me back around to the incredible shrinking Kansas City Star, which could do itself and this community a HUGE favor by focusing 100-percent on local news, sports and entertainment.

Although the average edition of The Star wraps a lot fewer fish than it used to, it’s still way too big. I would wager that most of us turn to other news sources for national and international news. Same with Hollywood gossip and features.

But The Star is uniquely qualified to cover in-depth stories related to crime and neighborhood issues, our crumbling streets and sewer systems, the circus otherwise known as City Hall and a thousand other things that affect area citizens.

And using The Telegraph’s news-gathering model, they could perform this function efficiently and in a manner that would engage enough online (and in-print) readers to drive revenues for years to come.