THE REAR VIEW MIRROR: Lessons learned from the Y2K crisis: Why every company needs a crisis communications plan
By David Josephs
Help. I need your help with a potential crisis…
I would be lying if I claimed that managing crisis situations has been a regular feature of my 30 years advising clients. Those of you with longer memories will recall the millennium bug challenge at the end of the last century. I was telling a group of brilliant Laika colleagues about this when I ran a crisis communications workshop with them earlier in the year, in Berlin. Most of them were in pre-school at the turn of the century.
The Y2K crisis
It was believed that the way in which computer programs had been designed would lead to mass system failures at the turn of the millennium, and hence the so-called ‘Y2K’ crisis was born.
The industry spent years preparing for the challenge, and countless columns were written predicting various levels of catastrophe. Here’s how the New York Times covered it in 1998.
Many of my clients were involved in this. One in particular, asked the company I ran at the time to act as their on-call press office for the entire holiday season. This included setting up a response room on New Year’s Eve 1999. Now, I was the MD of the company, and believed in leading by example, and had recently become a Dad for the second time, so my wife and I were not planning anything special. Thus, I volunteered to be the on-call member of the team. My company was paid a significant five-figure sum for this service.
We’d spent months preparing a crisis communications plan, including developing a manual, in case the millennium bug fulfilled the worst predictions of various commentators. Remember, there was a genuine fear that planes might fall out of the sky. The question will you fly on Millennium Eve became a real topic of conversation.
Much ado about nothing
So on New Year’s Eve itself, as well as entertaining my 3-year-old son and his 9-month-old baby brother, I was keeping an eye on the TV as New Year’s Eve dawned on the other side of the globe. What would happen? Would nuclear reactors melt? Would the banking system collapse? Would planes actually drop from the skies?
The answer was no. Nothing happened. Hardly anything at all went wrong. As New Year’s Eve crept ever closer in the UK, it became abundantly clear that either the IT industry had dealt with the situation magnificently, or the scale of the problem had been massively exaggerated. I will let you be the judge of that. Here’s an interesting article in Time magazine on the issue.
There is no excuse for poor preparation
So in my experience, very few companies encounter a significant crisis. But that is no excuse for poor preparation. All companies should ask themselves these questions:
What type of crisis might we be exposed to?
Who should lead the company’s crisis response?
With whom should we be communicating?
This is particularly important for consumer facing companies. It is so easy to make a complaint against a company now, and whilst this might not constitute a crisis, it can become a matter of reputational damage.
So I urge you to work with your PR teams to consider how you will respond to negativity, and to plan accordingly.
My top tip?
Plan for the unexpected, and plan for it to happen at the most inconvenient time. How are you going to deal with a crisis situation that emerges on a Sunday night when no one is online and top management are all on a transatlantic flight?
Are you ready?
And here is my acid test: a former employee uses your corporate Twitter account to claim all manner of issues at your company. It’s not too complicated for anyone to actually do this, right? And the question is: are you prepared to manage this situation confidently and professionally? If the answer is no, it’s time for you to have a chat with PR professionals, like Laika, to help you get ready.
David Josephs
ABOUT ME: I’ve worked in the PR industry for 30 years, and have advised tech companies of all shapes and sizes ever since. My experience extends across Europe, the US and the Middle East. My posts for Laika aim to share some of those experiences to help you make the most of your investment in PR. I’m proud to serve on Laika’s Board of Advisors, and support the team through training sessions and one-to-one guidance.