CHAPTER 10

Disclosure of Information

When I have discussions with other professionals, no topic gets more ethical questions than disclosure of information. Transparency is a watchword. But practical transparency can challenge even the most senior pros. We are confidants and counsel, yet we also advocate disclosure. Where do we draw the line?

PRSA states in its Code of Ethics “Disclosure of Information.”

Disclosure of Information in Action

Some disclosure issues are straightforward, but some present gray areas. Let’s start off with a big one dealing with what you can and cannot disclose. Or as Robert Johnson, former Head of TSA Comms asks, when national security is on the line, how do you handle public relations ethically?

My most challenging ethical issue was when I was managing communications after 9/11 for TSA. Americans wanted to know what their government was doing with regard to transportation security, mostly related to aviation. It was my job as the head of that office to explain it to them without giving up secret or top secret information. There was a big worry in the country at that time that there would be another attack, and that it would be just as bad if not worse. How could we keep the economy going without risking some future attack?

My job often was to find a way to inform the media and thus the public about what we were doing without jeopardizing national security. The media never got all that they wanted, but they got a lot more than the TSA people wanted to give them because I was acting on their behalf, trying to balance two very different and competing interests.

Telling the truth and national security. Could it be compromised, should you go too far in telling the truth?

You have to start by convincing them the need to not only communicate something, but that you can do it without giving up too much. I spent a lot of time interfacing with people who had been admirals of the Pacific fleet, commanders of all the tanks in Europe, and all of the B-52 bombers in the Western hemisphere. There were a lot of people leaving very, very high-ranking military jobs to come into aviation to help secure the homeland.

They all had a very strong opinion of what should be done. They all had been in charge. So, here is this kid, compared to them I was 36 or 37 years old, telling them we need to show the media how we’re going to train pilots to carry firearms on an airplane because we spent decades trying to get guns out of airplanes, now we’re putting them in. We’re allowing it. We’re encouraging pilots to get trained.

It took me four months to convince the front office and the people involved in the training program in Georgia that we could develop a session with the national media to give them some sense for what we were doing. We had to scrub the curriculum. We had to work with the participants in that first class of pilots—for everyone wanted to see the first class of pilots who volunteered. Then ultimately, I had to deliver. I had to show them through the coverage, which is a little scary, because you don’t control what the media does. I had to show the people who I had talked into doing this, that we could do it without giving anything away.

So, you put a little bit of your credibility on the line. You go in and you say, “I can get this done, but you have to let me do it the way I tell you to do it. I will work with you. If there’s something that you think Osama Bin Laden is going to use against us, you tell me. We’ll find a way to get that out of the program, but in the end, we have to give them something. We can’t leave them all at the front gate.”

It was a long process, and thankfully, I had great staff around me. We worked hard on it. We went to Georgia a few times to sit down and walk through it all before the nation’s and the world’s media showed up at the door to see this. We organized it, we managed it very tightly, and in the end, the coverage was awesome.

We created a program that I think they still use to some extent to this day. That training is to some degree open to the media. Not all of it, there are some tactics that we don’t want any adversaries to know about because that would help them find a way to breach the cockpit, but there are some things you can show that aren’t going to give anything away. We found a way to split that issue right down the middle. We walked a tightrope from Day 1 to the end, but we delivered it.

One challenge we faced is how do you simplify complex information. It’s different with every situation. It was easy in that case because the people we were working with who were not communicators didn’t want to give the media anything. They just wanted to say no comment to everything. When I took over that office, that’s what they were doing, and they were wondering why their media program was so bad. The media was attacking them all day long because they had nothing to eat. They were hungry, nobody was giving them anything. We rolled out everything during that time. We were adding 5,000 screeners to the payroll every week. We were adding dozens and dozens of airports to the program every week. We were rolling out 100 percent checked bags. For people who are old enough to remember those days, the bags weren’t being checked before that.

And then, we had to put in a program that ruined the award-winning airport lobbies that made them angry and slowed down the boarding process and caused everybody to have to leave their pocketknife at home. The whole thing made everyone upset despite what we saw on TV live on 9/11.

We just went through very calmly and tried to find ways to tell good stories. We knew that we were going to have to prove ourselves over and over and over again. We took baby steps. We didn’t try to do the big stuff first. Guns in the cockpit was not until much later in our program.

It was a little easier than if that were the first thing we would do. If you’re trying to get people in your organization to come along with you, to help you tell stories that can benefit your audiences and your organization, I would say start small. Get some credibility or bolster what you already have, and just do it by proving it. Over time, as people start to trust you more, it will be easier for you to do what you need to do when it gets tough.

Communicators know they need to be honest and accurate, but Jay Baer, bestselling marketing and CX author and inspirational speaker, highlights restaurants’ ethical dilemma: COVID-19 disclosure:

I live in Bloomington, Indiana, a college town about an hour south of Indianapolis. Many of my friends here are in the restaurant business. It’s a relatively small community. There’s probably a hundred thousand people here all in, relatively close knit. What’s interesting is when workers at restaurant A are diagnosed with COVID-19, which happens with some regularity because the restaurant community tends to congregate off hours. That being the case, restaurant A has a worker that has been diagnosed positive, sends that worker home and presumably quarantines them until they pass a negative test and then welcomes them back.

But in the interim, it’s business as usual. That’s option A. Option B, which happens some of the time, is the restaurant discovers that a worker has been tested positive, closes the restaurant for deep cleaning, tests all of the staff, and then publicly notifies the entire community. That is the exact same situation with an entirely different approach. It is a huge fork in the road.

I find it fascinating because it’s literally playing out right in front of me every day in my community. Every day, another restaurant closes. Every day, another restaurant has a positive case, but doesn’t mention it as reported. You find out usually anonymously on Reddit or somewhere like, “Yeah, somebody in the kitchen has it, they just didn’t close.” And it’s interesting to see how the community reacts to each of those decisions.

Those who are aware of businesses hiding positive tests are unhappy and threaten to not spend money in those businesses for the foreseeable future. The challenge is that the people who stay up on those kind of things on a Reddit is a very small minority of the overall population. It’s going to filter out via word of mouth in a town like this eventually, but it’s not the same as making an announcement on your Facebook page or in your e-mail, or even on the homepage of your website that, “Yes, indeed, we had a positive test and we closed as a result for three days to make sure everybody else tested negative.” I find that to be an interesting ethical conundrum.

What’s been heartwarming is that where restaurants have pro-actively said, “We have to stay closed for a few days and retest everybody.” The community has rallied behind that in an unbelievable way.

That kind of reaction is heartwarming, but by the same token, nearly every restaurant is struggling at almost an existential level right now. While the ethical decision to keep quiet is perhaps puzzling on the surface, you understand why when the question is “If we have to close, are we even going to be able to reopen?”

When you are caught in wrongdoing, how much do you need to say? José Manuel Velasco, Past President of the Global Alliance for Public Relations, shares what he did when the company he worked for was caught making illegal payments:

The most difficult challenge I faced was the publication of the so-called Bárcenas papers in Spain. It was a case of illegal financing of the popular Conservative Party in Spain.

The company for which I was working then appeared in those papers. They conducted an internal investigation, and we recognized that the company had actually made payments to this illegal network. We were the only company in the sector that recognized the payments, although they did not coincide with the notes that appeared on the papers. It was different payments. But we did pay to this illegal network.

All other companies that appeared in the papers denied the payments or shut up. It was very difficult to convince the top management to do something different from the competitors and speak up. In my opinion, many companies are going to be in trouble because of their behavior.

We spoke up because the best communication strategy is truth. The papers were a very deep investigation about the relationships between many construction companies and marketing companies that were also working for the Conservative Party. There was a strong link between the payments of the construction companies and the events that the party was organizing. In theory, they were paying with this illegal money.

The decision was between following ethical or the legal advice. The legal view was very restrictive. The main goal was to protect the company. I also wanted to protect the company, but I thought we’d have to tell the truth because sooner than later, the truth will appear.

It was very helpful that the CEO of the company was appointed recently, and it was an issue from the previous administration. He was convinced that he had to make a strong decision.

For the company, thinking internally, it was a very good opportunity to make a strong decision about ethics, because the decision made by the CEO telling the truth that we have to make some payments to this network, was unusual. He used the opportunity to change the mindset of the company and to show that we have to keep different values.

Looking back, I would have changed many things. But as the Frank Sinatra song says, “I don’t regret anything.” I don’t regret anything not because I don’t have things that I could regret, because I have several, but because it’s not worth punishing yourself for something that happened in the past and you cannot change. You cannot change the past, but you can change the way you act. In my opinion, you have to learn from mistakes. That is very important, to recognize that you have made some mistakes in the past. It’s a very good opportunity to learn from mistakes, from failures, including bad things.

Michelle Egan, APR, Fellow PRSA, Chief Communications Officer of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, faced another horrifying issue when the company for which she works, equipment caused the death of a middle schooler.

The company that I work for has a lot of heavy equipment and trucks out on the road. One afternoon I was in my office and a vice president came in and said, “I’m going to need your attention right away. This is not a good situation.”

A large truck had been involved in an accident with a bicyclist, a middle-school student on his way home from school. The student didn’t survive the accident. It was a very sad and extremely unusual type of event to happen in our organization because of our safety focus.

The accident wasn’t the driver’s fault. It wasn’t due to any equipment malfunction. But on the day of the accident, we did not know that. Just like any other crisis, you know very little about the facts.

We have what we call a “no surprises” approach to communication here, that’s our strategy. It means that we immediately go out with information to the appropriate stakeholders as soon as we know something. We notified our employees right away of the incident and our stakeholders, and I responded to media inquiries.

Then, of course, an investigation was launched immediately by law enforcement, and we participated. That is consistent with our company values around truth and transparency. Also that day, our senior leadership gathered to talk about what actions should be taken, keeping records, cooperating with the investigation, reaching out to the contractor—for it was actually a contractor of ours that was driving the vehicle.

In this meeting, I recommended that our president make contact with the mother of this young boy who died. The recommendation wasn’t about public relations. I had no intention of sharing with anyone that this call was made, but it felt like the right thing to do in terms of the compassion that we want to show for the people that we impact. That was my recommendation, but for many good reasons, other executives counseled against any contact at that time. They had lots of good and legitimate reasons, and I wasn’t sure that what I was suggesting was the right thing to do other than it felt like the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure if making the phone call was the right thing to do in terms of what was best for the company, but it just felt right.

Everyone else on the executive team thought this wasn’t the right thing to do. They had a lot of good reasons. Reasons like, we don’t know the facts of what happened. We don’t want to interfere with the investigation. We might be facing a lawsuit and we don’t know what that will be about. Probably most importantly, we don’t know if this is a sensitive or an insensitive thing to do. We don’t know how this mother will take it. Everyone’s experience of grief and shock is different. And so, for about 48 hours, I talked to each of the execs and got their opinions, and our president still was unsure whether he wanted to do this or not.

But he had a long career in the military, he’d had many occasions to reach out to people who’d lost someone. He’s a kind and thoughtful man. Talking to the mother was consistent with who he is and consistent with our company and our values.

In the end, I worked with all of our executives to find a way that he could make this call. He wanted to reach out to this woman. We worked together, and we agreed that I would sit in on the call, that it would be brief. We agreed on what he would say and also that I would take notes so that we would have a record of this call. It was a real privilege to be included in that.

We compromised and found a solution everyone was comfortable with, and in the end, it was the right thing to do.

One important thing for practitioners to know is the people that we work with all bring an important perspective to the table. There were a lot of perspectives that needed to be considered. It was a difficult phone call because of the pain the mother was in, but mostly the call was just listening to her talk about her son. And it felt like we had been the compassionate organization that I know we are.

When you counsel a senior leader, you have the trust of that individual—you get to see them in some pretty, pretty raw times. It’s quite a privilege.

There’s some work by Dr. Marlene Neill that’s very powerful where she looked at senior practitioners and how they navigated ethical issues. One of the strategies that she found that practitioners are using most often is building alliances. This was an example where the alliances that I had built over many years came into play.

I use them all the time, because again, we don’t always have the best answers or the best solutions. I’ve been lucky to work with some people in our legal department who have a great perspective. We say, “Let’s talk about what you want to do, what you think we should do, and then let’s find the way to do it that all of our risks are going to be considered, not just reputation risk.”

Ken Hunter, President and Chief Strategist at The PowerStation, faced disclosure issues when one of his clients was accused of making people sick.

I had an organ and tissue procurement organization for transplants as a client. This company specialized in bone tissue. All of a sudden, they were running into cases where patients were contracting hepatitis, and they weren’t sure if it was from them or the hospital. The FDA came in. The CEO was in a very big panic wondering, what should I do about this? They may shut us down. Our reputation is going to be ruined.

As a PR person, you have to try to balance the potential of lawsuits versus the public’s right to know, versus are we going to just create broad panic for no reason at all? We haven’t yet confirmed what the problem was. It took a couple of months to finally find where the problem lay. It was something where the testing wasn’t even picking up the fact that there was hepatitis in some of the bone tissue that they would give to hospitals to transplant into people.

By the time that happened, there were lots of stories in the press and the big warning about doing business with this company. They suffered a big blow to their reputation for a while but were able to bounce back.

We counseled them to be honest, to tell here’s what we know now versus speculation. That helped us bridge the ethical gap. We had to decide between baring our souls or being a little more measured in what we put out and wait until we know for sure that X has happened before we go and tell everybody X has happened. That approach worked well. I know the FDA, when they were finished with their investigation, was happy in how the company was transparent.

During that case, I learned a fair amount about how to handle openness without saying, okay, everybody, here, come take a look. Pry through every file we’ve got. Taking a measured approach ends up serving the public better.

If others find themselves in a similar situation, first of all, you must build trust with the CEO and top management team. In this case, it included physicians, who weren’t necessarily skilled in communication techniques. The executives recognizing it is a serious situation that’s going to involve more expertise than just medical was big positive. Get trust by winning a couple of small battles in the beginning. From that point, start to work down from the CEO. Because now that the CEO trusts you, the medical director will tend to start trusting you more and other executives, the head of sales, you name it, will trust you. It’ll trickle down from the top.

At companies, the whole personality of the place comes down from the top. In this case, it was very good that the CEO was very open with his team, letting them know he didn’t have all the answers but is trying to protect this place.

I can remember another time dealing with a hospital system who was in the middle of a possible nurses strike. We’re in the war room, and I’m sitting across as outside counsel. The attorney and I are going back and forth. The attorney is worried about how big the lawsuits will be or how bad will we get burned in negotiations. The CEO was perplexed and started to develop a very personal dislike for the union side, for their negotiators who also had a personal dislike for the hospital side.

At one point; I was letting everybody vent and telling the lawyer this is going to be a long-term reputational problem that we need to think about. I remember the CEO just looked at the lawyer, looked over at me and said, you know something, I’m glad that we have PR here because I wouldn’t even have thought of these things. It got to the point where it was so hateful between the people involved because they were just so personally connected to it. They were very happy to just tell somebody else, here, I’m going to vent my spleen. I’m going to tell you everything that’s driving me nuts. It ended up working well, and they were able to get through that. A lot of times I will see top execs have taken things so personally by the time they have a communication person come on into the picture, it’s to their detriment.

To help executives get beyond feeling they are being attacked personally, I usually will let them vent in the beginning. It’s very important that people have that opportunity to tell their side of the story. Even though I may be paid by that CEO to come on in to help that person, I still try to be more of an impartial jury. Because I don’t have those years of experience in that company leading up to whatever that situation is, to see if the company culture potentially permitted this, or is there just a failure of an individual employee?

I like to serve as a quasi-devil’s advocate and go through who the different target audiences are for that company or issue. That helps them see the impact of whatever the decision is that’s made and are we including everybody. Do we have employees as a group that may be impacted? When you start running through the different target audiences, that tends to be an eye-opener because people usually naturally go to our customers as the start and the finish of the target audiences. That is a mistake.

Loring Barnes, APR, Fellow, PRSA, discusses tough ethical issues with disclosure of information in product recalls:

I was involved in a fairly famous product recall fail involving a tent that was manufactured by a very respected European outdoor product manufacturer. They had come to the United States, and we had just guided the company’s most successful national consumer product campaign, which was PR driven with very light, but creative advertising support. The advertising agency had launched 10-second ads that underscored the value proposition of this tent, which was that you literally threw it up in the air, and it unfolded.

When the ad tells you that next we will invent instant campfire—you are not expecting somebody from within the organization to come to you and say, “You know what? We’ve just discovered that this tent has not satisfied the more stringent fire-retardant standards of the USA. It had passed lesser standards overseas, but not in the US.”

I am the person who stood forward to the then U.S. CEO and said, “We need to act. We need to stop the work that we’re doing, and we need to do a 180 and we need to get these tents back.” Because not taking decisive and ethical action would have left families and children potentially at risk because where do you use a tent? You use it when you’re camping. And probably you have a campfire nearby. This was a potential disaster.

The CEO did not want to stop the campaign because he knew it was terrifically successful. Our work had paid dividends. There was a very high return on the campaign investment and very high response by consumers across the country for a brand that had very little national footing at that time. I pulled the plug on the campaign. I said, “You know what, I’m sorry but this is not only your corporate reputation, but this is my reputation and that of my team and it is wrong to continue to do this.” We ended up going to Europe and explained to the corporate leadership there why it was that we felt that this was the action to take.

At the end of the day, they recognized the ethical decision that we had put before them, and they released the U.S. CEO. We proceeded with a product recall with the consumer product safety commission. We did the right thing.

If other people find themselves in similar situations, this is where the Internet is your friend. It is not hard to find a story that has a parallel track of a problem that you could indicate to be transferable and instructive. You can say, “This is not a new road, here are the consequences that these other organizations suffered.” When you can show the true revenue cost and impact from doing the wrong thing, you’re going to have some stronger footing for showing them that redemptive action is always the way to go.

There’s no shortage, sadly, of stories where individuals’, leaders’, and brands’ reputations have eroded when they have done the wrong thing. You can easily point to them and say, “Do you want to travel this path? If not, these are the steps that we need to take. And I have the professional training and confidence and department to guide you through this. I understand that an organization is not just the people from within, it’s all these other stakeholders and that the messaging and the activities that you need to take are very different.”

Walk the talk. Bad behavior never happens privately. It happens in public. We all have a cell phone. We’re all whistleblowers. An organization doesn’t own its ethical reputation. It has to live an ethical reputation, but the referendum on how they do and how they behave against an expected moral compass happens well outside of the corner office, and that’s how any organization recruits and retains talent, which foremost are the most effective and credible. Without that understanding, you’re missing a major gap in the lifeblood of any organization’s growth and success.

Disclosure of information hit close to home for Kelli Bravo, VP Healthcare, Pegasystems. She had to address the ethical considerations in admitting an error in their software.

A while back, I worked at a healthcare IT company that also provided healthcare content. One year, one of our software content releases had a major error. Not just a typo, but one that affected the workflow. The dilemma was centered around what to do next. Do we re-release the product, which costs a lot of time and money, or do we just communicate about the error and hope folks catch it when they use the content?

Back then, software releases followed a waterfall approach, which meant it could be a three- to six-month release cycle because it wasn’t just a patch. You needed a full QA process. You had to reissue the software, retrain the clients on how it is used, and how it worked, which was time consuming and expensive.

We sat back and we said, what should we do now? We conferred with our software team, the content developers, and a bunch of our clients to determine the best path forward. We knew it was expensive. It was going to be time consuming to reissue this software. But at the end of the day, it was the right decision.

We ultimately moved forward with a new release, but it took a lot of conversation. This new release required a reissue, new client training, and admitting the fact that we had made a mistake. In today’s agile, low-code/no-code environment, this process would have had a much lower cost and more rapid turnaround, a lower client impact. It would have made the decision a whole lot easier, but ultimately, I think we would have absolutely come to the same conclusion. You have to do the right thing.

To make this happen, we discussed the tradeoffs and being able to tell the organization that at the end of the day, we all want to work for an organization that acknowledges its mistakes. Because your reputation and the reputation of your company holds fast when you do the right thing. The right thing includes admitting when you make a mistake. As long as you learn from that, it’s okay. It shows that you and your company are mature, accountable, and care about your customers. Lay it out and show the financial impact, the reputation impact, client and employee feedback.

At the end of the day, people do business with organizations and other people they trust. If they were to find out that we hadn’t been trustworthy, we would have lost more than we would have gained from the financial impact. It’s a long-term play. If you can’t continue to maintain trust with your customer base, you will not continue to grow and succeed. The right decision comes forth as a result of putting your thinking cap on and having that collaborative discussion with your executives to help them understand and frame the problem.

Hiding something in a bullet on page 98 isn’t going to be the process that works for me or my team. Be very direct and clear. Recognize people don’t typically hear the message the first time. You need to share it two or three times to ensure that people understand the difference.

Don’t be swayed from your convictions by things like cost or convenience when it is the right thing to do. It’s okay to make a mistake, but you need to be accountable for it and show that you care about your customers.

Time Pressure and Disclosure of Information

BJ Whitman, APR, Fellow PRSA, a PR professional, faced an ethical issue with timely disclosure of information when it came to the death of an employee.

It was a regular day for me at work. I was on my way down to meet the executive chef at 9:00 a.m., and I got a call from the executive office saying, “Hurry to the kitchen. There is something wrong with the chef.” I walked into a kitchen in complete chaos. Employees were crying, some people were running out of the kitchen, and a couple of the employees were holding an employee who had just stabbed the chef, who was on the floor in a very bad condition. A number of employees were kneeling down beside him trying to comfort him.

I immediately called 911 and called the executive office to let them know that the ambulance was on the way. I knew the chef had a brother who worked at a hotel nearby, so I called him and let him know what hospital to go to. The general manager was not at the hotel, he was on the mainland, attending his own father’s funeral. So, the assistant manager and I oversaw the crisis.

At 11:00 a.m., the employees were told that the chef died from the injuries received from the stabbing, and immediately the media frenzy began. It was a hotel of 1,000 employees, who are in complete mourning over this wonderful beloved chef. He was a wonderful person, who was personable and dedicated to all of his employees.

By noon, we provided background information to all the media through a press conference, and those at the hotel who had e-mails. The only item I could not get to the media right away was a photograph of the chef. We had sent three photographs to the family to choose from that we had on record. The picture finally was chosen by 3:00 p.m., and released to the media, in time for the evening news and for the following morning daily papers.

But during that timeframe, I had received harassing and unprofessional calls, e-mails, messages, and even scoldings in front of other reporters from one TV reporter. But it was worth the wait for the family. It was a picture that ended up living on for many years.

Whenever there was another incident in the hotel or a violent incident in any hotel in Waikiki, the chef’s picture was used. Unfortunately, the chef’s family had additional tragedies when the son fell off a cliff and died. Again, the chef picture was used. So, in a very, very odd way, I was proud that we had the patience and the wherewithal to wait and didn’t force the family to pick a picture that they wouldn’t have otherwise been happy with.

I considered the behavior of the TV reporter unethical, and certainly, there was no cause for the nastiness and belligerence that she had presented. The sentiment is supported by the rest of the media who were considerate about the fact that the family wanted time to choose a picture that they could actually accept.

My advice to others is build things like family approval into your process. And you have to be willing to tell reporters that they will get it, but they will get it upon the approval of the family.

Mike McDougall, APR, Fellow PRSA, President of McDougall Communications, had a disclosure issue when clients made up news.

I had a client who on their own they went out and announced that they had an employee relief fund around a natural disaster that had just struck.

They wanted to be in the global conversation around this natural disaster and to be seen as forward looking and helpful of their employees. The challenge was twofold. One, there were very few employees of the company in the area where this natural disaster occurred. So even if there was a relief fund, it was great but would have minimal impact. Two, there was no employee relief fund. They purely generated this for the media exposure.

It came to my attention about two hours later. Unfortunately, I was traveling. It was an issue that happened in Asia during the overnight hours and early morning hours when I was still asleep on the West Coast. I woke to a series of e-mails and texts from peers asking about this employee relief fund. Why hadn’t they heard of it?

We quickly advised the CEO of the company that we should retract this. Remove it and apologize that it was put out, not even in error, but put out without proper counsel and then stuff the genie back in the bottle as much as we could. Unfortunately, the person who drove this doubled down and so much wanted to be part of the conversation. They continued to make contacts on their own. We found ourselves facing questions from media later that day for details around our employee relief fund. How long had it been in existence? What do you plan to do? We chose to be honest to the extent we could with media by saying that those details were not available. We needed to evaluate how this would be operationalized without throwing the organization under the bus. And then we pushed for and got the establishment of an employee relief fund immediately. If we’re going to say we have one and we don’t, we’d better create one now.

Oddly enough, the view inside the organization and particularly the executive who was pushing this was, “No, we don’t need to. We can just say we have one. We’ll figure it out later.”

That’s probably the most egregious ethical breach I’ve seen in my career. Honestly, he thought he was smarter than anyone else in the world and no one would figure this out.

My view of crisis communications is don’t put your brand in front of a crisis knowingly. A natural disaster’s not a place I want my brand to be. Unless there’s good reason for it to be there. That was a horrible, horrible situation. We mitigated it.

There are times when you can get involved. When I was working for Bausch & Lomb, we would ship an 18-wheeler full of eye drops and solutions to the firefighters working the California wildfires. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do.

Sure, we told our industry that we were doing this. But we didn’t hype it. We made them aware because others were doing the same thing. It was being part of a community that ultimately was looking out for our customers and looking out for the country. That’s the right thing to do. That’s going to come back and help you. Shameless promotion is not. People see through that pretty quickly.

Dianne Danowski Smith, APR, Fellow PRSA, President and Founder of Publix Northwest, shares her insight into how to deal with unreasonable reporters seeking disclosure in unethical ways.

I received a call at 2:45 from a reporter writing on a very controversial story. The reporter was making statements that just make you cringe. And by the way, the reporter’s going to file the story at 3:00, and do we have a comment?

I always interview a reporter before I let them interview my client. I want to make sure that the reporter is as informed as possible. Sometimes the reporter’s going to need some background.

This reporter was known to be a difficult reporter to work with. I pushed back on the reporter. I said, “Well, it sounds like you’ve got the story already written by the questions you’re asking me.” And I said, “You’re filing it at 3:00 and it’s 2:48 right now.” I said, “Does that seem fair to you since your story is about my client’s company?” I actually said, “Is that ethical? You’re not giving us a fair opportunity to rebut your accusations or to provide information that might take your story in a different direction.”

The reporter did not appreciate me saying that.

I said, “Well, I’m going to work my hardest to try to get the information. Our chief medical officer would be the perfect person. They’re very familiar with this situation.” But the chief medical officer wasn’t available before 3:00. I had to say, “If you can wait so I can get you an interview so you have a fair and balanced story, then I can get you with that particular professional.” But the reporter didn’t wait. He filed the story, and it was biased.

I tried going back to the reporter. The reporter wouldn’t take my follow-up phone call when the story was published. I went to the editor at that point. And I said, “There’s a very serious issue going on here.” The editor didn’t necessarily agree with me because I was a PR person and I asked about their policy on fairness, fair, and balanced coverage.

It ended up to being a good conversation or with the editor. A couple days went by, and I called the reporter again, and he took my call and he and I ended up having a very good conversation.

Industries can present their own disclosure of information issues. David Calusdian, President of Sharon Merrill Associates, shares insight with regard to investor relations.

In IR, you need to be honest about a company’s performance. That’s what it comes down to. It’s an ethical issue, but it’s also a legal one. The SEC will point out when you’re being misleading by just focusing on the positives of a company’s performance. What you said in a press release headline might be true, but if you aren’t giving investors all the information they need to make an intelligent investment decision, then the SEC has an issue with that. Any good IRO will have an issue with that too. You need to communicate the good with the bad. It has to be holistic communication that in the end gives an investor all the information they need to make an intelligent investment decision.

You want to put your best foot forward, but most importantly, you have to be honest in what your overall communication is telling investors. That’s where ethical issues occur. You may get pressured to only put the positive forward, but as a good IRO, you need to tell the whole story.

One of the trickiest issues deals with timeliness. Timing and disclosure are always connected. For example, companies are sometimes debating whether to pre-release poor performance before quarterly earnings, but they may not know how bad it’s going to be. They may not know exactly if they’re going to miss and by how much on a certain date, but they may want to give investors the heads up. So, they are then faced with the situation of do we go out right now and give incomplete information or do we wait a few days and make sure that we understand exactly where we’re going to come in. Or wait until we have a reasonable assumption of where we’re coming in and be able to discuss more of the factors that are going into that. There’s that decision as to whether you wait and give better information or go out quickly.

There is no hard and fast rule. It’s all situational. It’s like a crisis. Sometimes a crisis will hit a company and you may not know all the facts, and the playbook may say, get it out as quickly as possible. But if you might know more information in the next day, you might want to give yourself the day. It’s very situational, very company specific.

It’s very easy to say get the information out as soon as you know it, but it’s not always that easy. Sometimes you may get more information in the next minute, hour, or day that can help the public better understand the situation.

Ethical Disclosure of Information Advice

Influencers

Influencers are a powerful tool in a communicator’s toolbox. Over the years, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of ethical issues in dealing with them and disclosure of information. Troy Brown, President of One50one, shares his experience:

Influencer marketing is riddled with ethical issues.

I’m talking to brands now that still don’t understand the notion of how to post or how to ensure that FTC guidelines are followed or how to engage. Those are table stakes.

I won’t out folks, but there are celebrity-level entrepreneurs that are hundred millionaires, billionaires. I dealt with a lot of those folks in the media entertainment industry, and they are spirit brand owners, they’re clothing brand owners. These folks have brilliant minds. But you go to these people and say, “Listen, you can’t run that influencer program this way because these folks are your friends and you’re going to pay them.” Or “They have to post like this. They have to…”

And they say, “No, forget all that. I’m so-and-so. This is what we’re going to do.” I tell them, “Listen, ethically, you can’t do that. You can’t pay them like that, or you can’t do it.”

You’ve seen some of them get fined, but a lot of these businesses and companies at this point will just take the fines because they want to do it their way.

Gary McCormick, APR, Fellow PRSA, highlights another issue professionals face:

One disclosure concern I have deals with social media and public relations persons being active on their own channels. I’ve long asked the question about how effective a counselor or a public relations professional can be for their clients when they’ve already established their own social media personality with deliberate political or social views or opinions. I just question (and this is, again, my personal opinion) but are you able to be equitable and balanced in your work for clients when you already have a pronounced opinion?

When you use your own social media and become a voice in a certain area, it will limit the clients that you can be a strong advocate for, and your own ability to see alternate views and opinions in counseling the client. We need to be very careful about our own channel and how much voice we put into that. All of us like a lot of things, and it’s very easy to see a person’s personality, opinions, and beliefs. There’s a fine line between being more of an advocate and less of a counselor.

I say this much more to younger professionals. Social media channels are a natural thing to them, and I’m not sure they understand how very easy it is to evaluate by clients.

You need to think it through. If, ethically, you’re fine with putting that out there and know it’s going to limit you professionally or personally, I say go for it. But we need to just stop for a moment and ask how well can you represent your client?

Martin Waxman, APR, shares his experience with third-party influencers and disclosure:

I was working with someone who wasn’t as transparent as I thought she should be. We had hired a third-party expert to do some interviews on behalf of our client. One of the tips they would mention was to use our client’s product.

This manager thought we should send out the media advisory, but she wanted to do it without letterhead, on plain white paper, to book this person with no mention of the agency or the client.

I said, “That’s wrong. You gotta be transparent. You gotta at least say, ‘Presented by this person.’”

We had a big argument, but she was a senior person on the account, she won out. She wasn’t able to accompany this person on the interview, so I was stuck taking this expert around. We got to one TV station, and I knew the producer quite well. The guy is unpacking his bag and he takes out one product, then he takes out another product, then he takes out another product. The producer came over to me and said, “Hey, what’s going on here? We thought this was going to be about the book and there’s all this product.”

I said, “Well, I’ve known for you a long time and here’s what the story is.” She was so mad. She yelled at me for a long, long time. Rightfully so. I took the heat for that, and the agency was banned from the program for about a year or so. Rightfully so.

I was able to come back and make a case to say, “Hey, we can never do this again. It hurts our credibility, not being transparent, and what are we hiding? Why don’t we be upfront? If they don’t want to cover, they don’t have to. We can move on and be creative.”

When working with a third-party influencer, you must disclose. The FTC demands it. In Canada, they have advertising standards:

It’s kind of is simple: don’t lie, tell people who you are and who you represent.

That’s one of the greatest things about social media. It’s underscored the need for transparency and, in a way, has helped communications people step out of the shadows and not necessarily be perceived to be puppet masters who are pulling the strings

Tami Nealy, Vice President of Communications and Talent Relations for Find Your Influence, also shares her expertise with ethics and influencer relations:

You need to be open and honest about what you want, what you’re looking for, what you want the content to be shaped like. And then you have to step back and empower the influencers to create that content.

The good news is in November of 2019, the Federal Trade Commission issued social media disclosures 101,¹ which is a guide for influencers on how to disclose that the content that they are posting is either paid, so they were paid to post it, or whether it was gifted to them. Either way, they want to see that you’re disclosing it with #ad or #sponsored or on Instagram you can tag the partner. You can say in partnership with X brand. You need to disclose that to your followers so that they understand that there was some level of compensation or gifting in exchange for that product. Most often the content and the experience that they had with it is authentic, but disclosing it is very, very, very important.

Other Advice

There are specific ethics issues in disclosure of information in security public relations. Bryan Scanlon, the CEO, Look Left Marketing, explains:

There’s an absolute arms race going on, where it’s the bad guys versus the good guys, and the bad guys are well-armed and very intelligent. And they’re winning in some fronts. When an arms race happens, the rhetoric gets high.

What we’re seeing in security now is some companies making some very big claims like, “We will stop all breaches.” Or “We make breaches irrelevant.” I find that language extremely disturbing. For me, it’s like saying, “We have a car safety collision system and you’ll never have a crash.” Well, you could disable that and still have a crash. You could have somebody just back into you and have a crash.

That is creating these dangerous statements. There are so many vendors in security now. An average enterprise has 80 or 90 different tools. They all sound like they do the same thing, and in a high-stakes, risky environment where critical infrastructure could go down, or money gets stolen or medical devices could be hacked. There’s a lot of room for hype there. The market’s very crowded, so it forces you to one-up your competitor. When you put those things together, you get this hype machine that keeps going higher and higher.

Things have to change, but there’s this temptation every day to do the “The sky is falling. The sky is falling.” People are getting very tired of it and the ultimate danger is we just become numb to it, and people stop listening to the important stuff.

The first question I ask is, “Let’s talk about facts. You say you can stop all breaches. Has your system ever been breached? Or did every one of your customers not have a breach?” And the answer is, “Well, of course, no. But that was other technology that got breached.” It creates this discussion of just how farcical those claims could be.

Then we ask, why are we doing this? What is the problem that we’re trying to solve? What is the pain for the customer, and how do we target that?

In security, there’s a lot of cooperation between the vendors despite all of this hype and rhetoric. Because they believe in one thing that there are some bad guys out there, and we need to stop them. There’s a serve and protect component. If we can steer people toward that and remind them that that’s the business that we’re in, things work out okay.

There is an ethical process for reporting security issues. It is called “responsible disclosure” and is very common in the security industry. The good guys, the vast majority of companies, abide by it. If you found a flaw in a version of Windows, or in an Alexa device—responsible disclosure’s tenets basically say this: I’m going to contact that company and tell them that I found that problem. And they’re going to have a chance to fix it, or have a patch available, before I disclose that. So, when you go public, you’re disclosing something that is likely already fixed or solved, or you’re contributing to the education of everyone of what they need to do to download or patch.

It’s something that we always ask our clients. Did you disclose this? Do they know? Is the patch going to be ready? Because there is pressure in that competitive environment to release that news quickly before some other researcher reveals it.

There are people who have done a big show of disclosing vulnerability without contacting the company, and I find that highly unethical. Those people, pretty quickly, get some shade cast on them. You never want to put a user at risk.

However, there is this other disturbing thing that’s happening a little bit in that I’m seeing the arms race come into play. Where, as part of that responsible disclosure, you’re inevitably telling other researchers, and those researchers then, themselves, face an ethical dilemma of when do they jump on it? I actually had an instance last year where we were doing pre-briefings before responsibly disclosing a bug in critical infrastructure. A reporter called another researcher, and that researcher quickly put some stuff together, hacked it, and then released it ahead of our deadline, and risked going ahead of the problem being fixed. That’s not appropriate.

Ron Culp, APR, Fellow PRSA, Professional Director, Graduate PR and Advertising Program at DePaul University, has advice for companies countering disinformation:

So many people think making a response is enough. It’s not, especially if your employees are reading it. Your employees are going to read and believe about 40 percent of what they see online. Some companies will say, “We responded online. We clarified. Everyone is fine.” Meanwhile, there are pockets of the organization that are saying, “Did you see that online?” It’s just like a telephone game. By the time it gets spread four or five times, it becomes a bigger issue than you ever imagined.

If something appears about you, you want to make sure that you assess it quickly as to how much into the organization has this story spread, and is it something that we need to say something further, either through our internal website, Internet, or however we’re going to communicate to employees, so they know our point of view. Because if you don’t correct it pretty broadly, there’s going to be a degree of people who are going to believe the mistruth that was said.

A lot of people will pooh-pooh what happens on social platforms, but there has been a lot more attention to how omnipresent it is and how vital it is for prompt response. Make sure you cover all your bases, or the next thing you know, a large number of people are going to be believing the mistruth.

Garland Stansell, APR, Chief Communications Officer for Children’s of Alabama, has great overall advice on the best approach to ethical disclosure of information:

If you only do the bare minimum of what is required legally, it can create more problems down the road. By being forthright and transparent and saying, yes, this happened. Here’s what we’ve done and here’s what we are doing, that satisfies the media and the public. If you are not being transparent and forthright, it can make you look like you were trying to cover up or hide something.

 

¹ Federal Trade Commission. November 05, 2019. “FTC Releases Advertising Disclosures Guidance for Online Influencers.”