Last week I was honored to address the Communications Committee of the American Financial Services Association (AFSA) on the challenges and opportunities associated with new and emerging technologies. The committee is made up of senior communications practitioners from firms such as Wells Fargo, Ford Motor Credit, HSBC etc. all of whom have faced significant challenges in the last couple of years and are now grappling with the prospect of widespread regulatory reform.

I used two case studies to illustrate my points on issues management and wider communications. I thought readers might like to see them:

#1 was from Ford itself:

“…Ford has got a lot to be proud of in this area. It has a head of social media in Scott Monty who has proved time and time again the value of the medium. Incidentally, he has 27,000 followers on Twitter. Compared with Ford itself – 13,000 or so.

In this example, Monty was alerted to online criticism of Ford’s legal efforts to shut down a fan website “therangerstation.com” The criticism began as a blog post, spread to twitter and eventually resulted in over 1000 direct customer complaints.

Monty didn’t wait to ascertain the facts, posting to his blog and his Ford and personal Twitter feeds that he was investigating it and frequent updating his followers – some of whom he could be pretty sure would forward or retweet the information to their followers.

Within hours, he reported that Ford’s lawyers believed the site was selling counterfeit goods with Ford’s logo. He persuaded Ford’s lawyer’s to withdraw the shut-down request if the site halted the sales. By the end of the day, Monty was able to Tweet that the situation had been resolved.

This action actually resulted in plaudits from the rangerstation.com. They even posted a very positive blog post, which must have gone some way to rehabilitating the brand with the complainants.

This result came about because Ford, through Scott Monty, was monitoring the conversation. Using social media in this way, routinely, or in a crisis can sometimes yield surprising results.”

#2, from Southwest Airlines, illustrated this point:

“Last month, a Southwest airlines flight from Nashville to Baltimore made an emergency landing in Charleston W.Va..

Southwest’s dedicated emerging media team immediately took to the information superhighway to gauge customer reactions.
To their surprise and delight, they found that comments were mostly positive and focused on the professional way in which aircrew handled the situation. This immediately shifted the company’s communications strategy from crisis mode to a celebration of the way in which staff and customers had worked together in an exemplary fashion. A net win for Southwest.”

We also spoke some about CEO weblogs. I’ll post separately on this subject. No doubt much, much more on new and emerging technology in the months to come……