Can Visitors Trust Your Site for Bad News?
Written May 22nd, 2007 by Ed BennettThere’s an interesting public relations crisis going on right now with XM Radio – one of the two satellite radio systems. (the other one is Sirius Radio). I’ve had XM for years – it’s always on in the car. On my drive home yesterday evening, I noticed that the signal was very weak, and the “No Signal” error kept flashing. This was unusual, and I figured there was a problem with my radio.
Later that night I ran out for an errand and XM was still not working. I wondered if the problem was with XM and not my radio, so I checked a fan site – www.xmfan.com
My first hint that something big was up came when I saw the number of visitors currently on the fan site. Instead of the usual 40-50 people reading the forums, there were over 500 on the site. The most active thread was the topic “Anybody lose their signal?” which had first posted at 10 am and had been read over 50,000 times. Over 500 XM users had posted responses.
Here’s the point of this post – I never considered going to the official XM Radio website for information. It didn’t even cross my mind. My assumption was that XM would not acknowledge the problem until they were forced to.
And I was correct. It took XM hours to post a short statement that there had been a glitch during a upgrade of the satellite software. This morning they updated the statement to say that repairs may take longer than expected.
On the other hand, the fan site had pulled together reports from across the US, and had come up with much more detailed information about the nature of the outage. As of 11 AM today XM is still down, and the number of people on the fan site is over 700. Also, XM stock is taking a dive.
What does this have to do with your hospital web site? Everything. Bad things happen and when they become public your hospital has to deal with a public relations crisis. Is your website part of the communications plan? Do you post information proactively or not at all? The lesson from XM is clear – if the situation is big enough, people will find ways to talk about it online – sharing facts, rumors and everything in between. What role does your website play when this happens?
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:13 am
We have always used our web site as the place to put our take or information on news. Here’s an example when our governor announces plans for a hospital tax:
http://www.aurorahealthcare.org/aboutus/issues/hospital-tax.asp
As people in our area are well aware, we’ve been embroiled in a controversy over a new hospital for several years. Here’s an example of how we’ve tackled news coverage head on to make sure our point of view is heard:
http://www.aurorahealthcare.org/facilities/more/western-waukesha/up-to-date/news/2007/js1-10-07.asp
Notice the annotations in the margins around the article.
Both got a good amount of traffic and have generated considerable input. You might not have thought to go to the XM site to find out what was going on, but it would have been the first place I would have checked. And it is certainly among the first place many journalists would check.
We ignore using our web sites in this fashion at our peril!
Neal
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:33 am
Neal – I really like how you handled the editorial. This is great way to present the hospitals viewpoint. I will share this with our public relations staff.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:42 am
I was more the technician than the strategist on that, so if your PR folks want to talk with our PR folks, just let me know. I’d be happy to make the connection. But we’ve followed that same approach on many issues that have appeared in the news, with great effect. At a minimum, the employees love it!
May 24th, 2007 at 6:31 am
I’ve talked about this many times with our PR team. Our web site is always the last place they address the press or an issue – good or bad. I’ve always felt it should be the first place we address an issue or PR need. This is where the public will go look first! I’m going to send out this post to them to remind them how important it is to have a communication on our own site first. Thanks for the great post!