While facilitating a crisis media training session for a relatively large national brand, one of the participants quipped, “But I don’t even care about social media. I’d rather just deal with real people.”

So would most of us.  I long for the day when people less than a half-dozen steps away would get off their arses and have a conversation versus send a stream of e-mail notes. But I digress, and I was one of those curmudgeon print reporters 20 years ago (albeit a cub) who thought hell would freeze over before people would opt for reading their news on a computer monitor.

Every organization should realize social media’s impact on dissemination and consumption of information, news and entertainment. Market power is shifting from organizations and brands, consumer and trade, to the consumer largely because of technology. Social media continues to grow as a consumer tool for decision-making, and it still seems many organizations and brands either struggle with, or refuse to accept, how or why they need to know how to engage in the Internet-connected, Tweeting, Facebooking, photo- and video-uploading stakeholder-engaged world. The seemingly few who are connected, Tweeting, Facebooking, et al. and inviting engagement from stakeholders recognize these connections are good for their organizations, brands and their business.  They “get it” that engagement is critical, whereas hordes of others in social media just see this as another platform to push out marketing messages a la Web 1.0

This consumer-driven engagement brings peer-to-peer endorsements and criticisms on organizations, brands, products, services and issues to an extraordinarily higher level than ever experienced. Word, not too long ago, spread gradually – days, weeks, maybe even months.  Today, with the Internet and all its social media outlets, we’re talking a matter of hours and even minutes, and not just with the families on your block.  Consumers can reach entire communities locally and globally.

That alone has a profound impact on how we manage crisis situations.  Social media is becoming the preferred platform on which an organization’s crisis unfolds and where control of the matter at hand is won or lost.  And that preference is coming from all corners except the organizations facing the crisis.

A prime example is the “United Breaks Guitars” fiasco.  The airline refused to take responsibility for breaking Dave Carroll’s guitar, and after nearly a year of getting nowhere, Carroll released his now famous video about United on the Internet, exposing the airline’s poor customer service. The video gained more than 500,000 views within a week, and mainstream media, including CNN, NPR, CBS, USA Today, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other traditional outlets globally, picked up the story, some citing “digital revenge.” Experts far and wide said United waited too long, finally proclaiming on Twitter, “This has struck a chord w/us and we’ve contacted him directly to make it right.” Too little too late? Many say, “absolutely.”

Ditto for Domino’s.  The pizza HQ waited 24 hours before posting a response on YouTube, where two workers – clearly anticipating their Culinary Institute of America acceptance letters – literally picked at some new ideas for ingredients.

There’s also Nestle, when consumers got a sweet tooth for revenge over the company’s interactions with consumers and Greenpeace supporters on Nestle’s Facebook page.  When you insult someone online, be prepared for the mob mentality – and to never win.

And there’s British Petroleum.  Where do we begin?  How about just looking at the hijacking of its brand on Twitter (see @BPGlobalPR).  Yes, it can happen to you and most know it’s a fake, but the lesson is realizing the risk of losing control of your brand.

This is all what digital trends expert Steve Rubel says clearly about what we’re facing: “An entire generation is growing up that will never dial a 1-800 number to reach customer care.”

We are dealing with real people, about 227.7 million of them in the U.S.; just not on the phone or in person – they’re on your desktop, laptop, mobile phone, iPad and soon to the next tech gadget coming down the pipeline, except for Kin.

Are you ready?

So Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship rose from rags to riches kicking the mining community in the family jewels.  In every case study and textbook on crisis management and crisis communication, values are the compass that guide individuals, governments and corporations through the most trying circumstances.

Massey Energy and Blankship’s values?  Money and power, and if there’s a ring of truth to the cascading revelations on safety violations and the wielding of political influence, we’re witnesses to what could be the most shocking view of corporate greed.  This could make Enron look like a hiccup.

Twenty-nine coal miners died in the April 5 mine explosion in West Virginia, and Blankenship’s communication strategy is ignorance – void of action and commitment for the victims, their families and the community. “It’s natural that the enemies of coal would view Massey as the primary enemy . . . I think that I’ve proven that we run safer coal mines — you know, most of the time — and accidents sometimes happen. We’ve got to figure out what happened here,” he said, according to Associated Press.

Human instinct puts us all in a defensive position when faced with potential blame, but smart and careful thinking of our impact on others makes us realize compassion is critical in the worst of times.  Rather than displace blame on “enemies,” or ridiculously state Massey sometimes runs safe mining operations, Blankenship’s better approach would have been to focus on the tragedy, its impact on employees, their families and the mining community, and an investment (whether intellectual, financial or both) in working with federal regulators in determining the cause of the accident and ensuring the mitigation of something like this happening again.

If Blankenship were smart enough to rise to the top of the mining industry, he’d be wiser to do a little homework on best practices in crisis management and communication.  Here’s Johnson & Johnson’s, which has been in the textbooks for decades and will be for decades more.

This is when true colors come out, and right now Massey and Blankenship’s is green – everyone else, no more than the victims’ families and the mining community, is seeing red.

It’s interesting to read news reports and analysis of Tiger Woods’ April 5 press conference, most notably the comments that follow from readers and viewers.  For the most part, we’re witnessing an icon who has fallen from a very high perch take baby steps to repair a once-golden image, while detractors try mightily to chip away at an already-fractured and fragile persona.

There appears to be an expectation that Tiger will be a changed man a few months after his world came crashing down.  Seriously?  It took more than a decade for Tiger to build this image on and off the course, and while it may not take as long for him to right his capsized ship, he’s looking at a couple of years – if not longer – to regain both the trust and accolades he’s been so accustomed to enduring.

Meanwhile, he’s doing the right things: becoming more public again, taking on more questions while keeping close to the vest what he feels is private (good for him, and can you blame the guy?), and constantly owning up to his errors and commitment to doing what’s necessary to regain trust.

Tiger doesn’t have an easy road ahead of him, and the detractors aren’t going away soon.  Here’s hoping he stays the course and proves them wrong.

The Tiger Woods brand consistently delivered on its expectations — integrity, dignity, determination, competitive fire and loyalty — on and off the golf course.  The brand experience was highly attractive to be repeated by fans, endorsers, news media and even his competitive foes, all telling of great stories and experiences with anything Tiger.

For Toyota, quality was the axis of its brand. The automaker entered the U.S. market decades ago amid a storm of skepticism on reliability, and Toyota quickly and has since silenced the naysayers, albeit until recently.

In produce, character is often reflected in the quality of products delivered to customers and consumers alike — freshness, taste and appearance — and in environmental stewardship, labor relations and food safety standards.

Read more thoughts in The Packer on what leaders in produce, and any other industry, can learn from Tiger and Toyota.

Toyota is curiously sitting at no. 7 in Millward Brown’s top-10 list of most trusted brands as Congress spent the better half of the week giving Toyota a tongue-lashing for its handling and mishandling of the automaker’s quality control crisis.

The study’s authors readily point out that the data was collected over the course of 2009 and doesn’t reflect Toyota’s current dilemma as it unfurled at the beginning of this year.  The authors also note the automaker could learn from Tylenol, which in 1982 recalled 31 million bottles of pills after seven people were killed in the tampering scare.  That brand, which was forced to recall children’s liquid medicine last year, sits at no. 6 in the study.

Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson has a history of effectively managing crisis situations, though the FDA earlier this year ridiculed the company for being slow to respond in its most recent crisis.  What this goes to show you, however, is a history of doing the right thing and acting aggressively in a crisis situation can maintain and build trust among stakeholders, consumers in particular.  Trust is fragile, and how you respond in a crisis situation can build and maintain trust, the authors state.

Toyota started off this week with public apologies before Congress.  How it fixes its problems, communicates with stakeholders and develops systems to prevent further lapses will determine if the automaker regains or builds trust, and where it will stand in next year’s report.

Tiger Woods spent about 14 minutes doing what he should have done nearly three months ago: he took his head out of the sand trap and decided to address his crisis head-on, albeit in a tightly controlled environment.

Better late than never, and we can spend hours rehashing the premise of acting quickly to manage a crisis (hundreds did it when news broke last fall, myself included, and more will berate him for waiting too long).  What Tiger did accomplish today was take that critical first step down the longest fairway of his life.  Rather than jump on the bandwagon and dissect everything he did wrong in his “no-questions-asked press conference,” here’s a look at what did well:

• Pulling his head out of the sand.  Crisis management is pure hell loaded with fear and uncertainty for any organization, let alone one individual, unaccustomed to dealing with panic.
• Acknowledging it was his own behavior and actions that led to his tarnished image and brand.  He didn’t make excuses and took accountability.
• Pointing out he veered from his personal set of values.  Very few in a crisis situation get this, that reputations and brands are built and will fall based on values.
• Admitting the impact of his actions on others, particularly his wife and kids; additionally, his fans – children in particular, topping it off with acknowledging he failed as a role model (Charles Barkley be damned).
• Asking to believe in him, not right away, but over time.  Tiger knows he needs to regain trust, from his family, from the corporate sponsorship world, from his peers and from his fans – and he also knows that’s a feat that won’t happen simply in the days and weeks ahead.  It will be his actions over a longer period of time – off the course.

Check out this interview on KUSI News on Tiger Woods’ first public appearance http://bit.ly/dff9ei

Driving any highway or back road, you can barely miss a Toyota.  The brand is an automaker’s version of the six degrees of separation.  Wherever you turn, you see one, or you know someone who has one or know someone who knows someone who drives a Toyota.  Quality was the axis of its brand.  I had a Camry a few years ago; loved it and wish I got another after wrapping my front end around the rear of an F-150 (even the best-made car won’t hold up to a monster truck).

Expectations were high when word got out that Toyota had a problem. Surely, a company that built a brand and a massive following of consumers into the world-leading automaker would do the right thing: Aggressively address the issue head-on, right its wrong, profess mea culpa and produce a solution.

And that’s precisely what Toyota did this week.  Problem is, Toyota’s crisis began to unfold last fall, and when the automaker unfurled its media-mix campaign this week, including plopping U.S. honcho Jim Lentz in network studios, critics attacked – and rightly so.

Toyota succumbed to the growing media and governmental pressure too late.  The automaker, and this isn’t backseat driving, knew well enough and long ago it had a problem that would only get worse.  Instead of being proactive, Toyota chose to stick its head in the sand.  That right there can tarnish any brand.

The very premise of issue and crisis management is prevention – not just stopping the headlines or social media storm, but anticipating internal and external threats or vulnerabilities and shoring up those gaps at the operational level.  It’s spending painstaking hours in the C-level suite agonizing over what gives the CEO insomnia and working with the senior management team on systems and protocols, and collaborating with industry, academia, vendors, suppliers and any other party in the supply chain.  It’s putting procedures in place to minimize the likelihood of disruption in business.

The automaker had to have had a crisis plan in someone’s filing cabinet.  Instead, millions of Toyotas are sitting idle in sales lots; even more consumers are now questioning the company’s mettle.

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer shows modest gains among three-quarters of the industries monitored, and findings point to these institutions doing the right thing and a level of increased transparency amidst a perilous global economy.  What’s more interesting, however, is an expectation that governments and companies will revert back to old habits.  That only tells us these gains are fragile and there’s a likelihood for future Barometer reports to highlight declining trust and expectations.

What better time is there to further build relationships and credibility than when trust is climbing?  Smart institutions will invest emotionally and intellectually by working with their stakeholders in identifying what stakes in the ground their trust is rooted in, tap into those beliefs and build upon them.  Doing so, these institutions could emerge from this recession not only stronger, but also with a competitive advantage – stakeholders in their camps.

The report also lays out a suggested path in building trust – a mosaic.  In short, it’s actively involving and engaging a network of stakeholders, including NGOs, to affect change within your organization and industry.  The concept isn’t so new.  Conceptually, it’s much like the coalition building model many of us toy with, yet primarily in issue and crisis management situations.  What the report is suggesting, and it makes perfect sense, is deploying this model as an everyday, long-term business principal, not for short-term objectives and means.

The report also seems to paint a picture of traditional media being left out of the loop in this mosaic.  Traditional media, unsurprisingly, continues to witness declines in trust, giving organizations more reason to question traditional media’s necessity.  Smart traditional media companies, however, would be wise to heed to the report’s call to get closer to stakeholders.  Even smarter ones will make drastic changes in their business model – and that’s not figuring whether a paywall for online content makes sense.  It’s about delivering upon expectations.  Right now, according to the report, that isn’t much.

Next up in the Tiger Woods pandemonium is the privacy debate.  Did a man in the public eye get stripped of his privacy by being forced to reveal his “transgressions?”

Let others take chip shots at that.  Instead, Tiger Woods the brand lost any privacy when he carved an image that personified high family and moral values.  Since his junior golf days, he, his family and his handlers meticulously crafted a brand of integrity, dignity, determination, competitive fire and loyalty.  His charitable endeavors and commercial endorsements further exemplified the Tiger Woods brand.

Successful brands reflect character – who you are and what you stand for, and clarifying that character is paramount.  It’s the centerpiece of an authentic and transparent brand proposition.  The Tiger Woods brand consistently delivered on its expectations on and off the golf course.  The brand experience was highly attractive to be repeated by fans, endorsers, news media and even his competitive foes, all telling of great stories and experiences with anything Tiger Woods.  Like any great brand, it’s more about what people say after you’ve left the room than what you say about yourself, and the Tiger Woods brand was molded perfectly to suit that.

But then the mold began to crack around Thanksgiving. It happens.  No brand will last without error, especially one that is human.  The smart brands, or at least those with smart handlers, realize that and are equipped to address any fissure in the brand – quickly. That’s where the crack in the Tiger Woods brand began to widen.  Rather than address any issues head on – the late, great golf teacher Harvey Penick always extolled “take dead aim” – the Tiger Woods brand went into bunker mode.  Control of the brand was lost – others filled the void while the brand was mum – and it was exacerbated by a refusal to talk with cops on three different occasions and apparent denials about extra-marital affairs.

And then the skeletons started coming out of the closet.  Instead of a New York City nightclub promoter, and we may hear more on that down the road, we’re hearing about hook-ups with a reality TV star and a Las Vegas nightclub marketing manager.

A brand is also your every action and deed, including inaction in a crisis situation.  The Tiger Woods brand ceded control; it can be regained, but it will be the longest tee shot in the man’s career.

The annual ICM Crisis report is a fairly in-depth look at the most affected businesses and industries over the past year, explicitly pointing out several instances that garnered media attention (traditional or social) – and there’s the rub.  The analysis is derived from a look at negative news coverage, and the takeaway appears to be that issue and crisis management is merely about keeping bad news off CNN, out of The New York Times or off Twitter.

So there were 10,000-plus crisis situations that made news in ’08, but what about the thousands that didn’t make news because the organizations or industries were prepared for the worst that could happen?

Sure, every CEO’s bladder will burst on the boardroom floor at even the notion of bad publicity, and the poor soul in corporate communications will suffer mop-up duty consequences.  We’ve all been there facing panic-stricken suits looking for a panacea, and it’s not a catheter or ultra-absorbent Jockeys. Our role in these circumstances is obviously helping company executives communicate to their stakeholders, but we’re failing miserably if we leave it at that.

The very premise of issue and crisis management is prevention – not just stopping the headlines or social media storm, but anticipating internal and external threats or vulnerabilities and shoring up those gaps at the operational level.  It’s spending painstaking hours in the C-level suite agonizing over what gives the CEO insomnia and working with the senior management team on systems and protocols, and collaborating with industry, academia, vendors, suppliers and any other party in the supply chain.  It’s putting procedures in place to minimize the likelihood of disruption in business.  (Toward the back end of the ICM report, the authors talk about “smoldering crises,” and this is were we as counselors are most effective.)

Case in point: Shortly after wrapping up a crisis plan for a food client with distribution throughout North America, disaster struck – bacterial contamination.  Systems and protocols were in place; all hands were on deck, and steps were followed.  While all hell broke loose, the crisis – with significant financial implications for the client – was managed effectively and not one headline written.  Was it not a crisis because it didn’t make the news?

Here’s another: A bug practically naked to the human eye has the capability to wipe out the California citrus industry.  News and social media coverage is but one facet of the communications strategy to call upon stakeholders to take action before the problem becomes too serious.  Is it crisis out of control or effective issue management before reaching crisis level?

One more: A widely known national consumer brand dating back to the ’50s closes manufacturing operations, putting thousands out of work.  Protocols supported strategy, and there was barely a mention in any form of media.  Crisis?

It goes without saying that even the best laid plans can likely end up falling apart (human error; unidentified gaps) and manure will hit the fan any second.  It’s the construction site explosion and not just readying the foreman for the media onslaught, but also preparing him to deal with death and liability.  Or the bagged-salad company looped into a national recall, even if its product was perfectly fine; counseling the company and its legal team on strategy, including a review and revision of its disaster preparedness.

Handling media is but one part of the job; operating holistically is doing the whole job.