I’m not going to say much about this, as it’s not really material to make a lot of in a company blog; but I did want to record these pages, because you thankfully very rarely see it. Before I do, my sympathies, respect and thoughts go to all of the families of passengers and crew as well as those searching for flight AF447 and to the staff of Air France at this difficult time.
We’ve talked before about contingency planning for all businesses on the web. Sadly, Air France had to to activate their worst case contingency plan yesterday. The page shown here appears on surfing to airfrance.com, and provides a main link to a site about the disaster, then much lower priority links to the business as usual sites. Note that there is no branding, it’s very sober and the link to the disaster contingency site is very factual.
Thankfully most of us work in businesses where we are not faced with potential contingency situations that require such a sober response and our contingency planning can be a lot less complex. You can however, learn a lot from companies like Air France, who on the face of it did this very professionally and competently.
I’ve recorded the other sites where the announcement appears, and the contingency site as well – which lives on a completely different server from the main Air France site.
You’ll notice that all of the other Air France sites have a consistent and similarly sober link to the contingency site, and that the announcement itself is incredibly brief, and again, has no branding. See below:
A newer challenge is how to deal with other media outlets, particularly social media outlets. Currently, Air France’s 5 or 6 Twitter accounts are simply frozen where they were. Below is the French regional account, that has a fare promotion to New York. There are numerous Facebook groups and fan pages, below is one fan page. This again, is simply not updated. I guess that social media is new enough that for Air France, it has not made it into an updated contingency plan. Take the opportunity now to rectify this if you’re in the same position.
The advice for PR people planning this kind of contingency, is not to take control of all of the social media outlets, but rather to brief all staff who run Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, etc. with a standardised message to put out on these channel in case of this kind of contingency. For this reason, it’s important also that anyone doing social media outreach ‘registers’ themselves with their PR team. You can action the implementation of that message in a global email to the whole company, making it easy to manage communications and timely action.
To those that run these sites and accounts, if you’re not getting any advice because your PR teams are tied up dealing with media, just put a straightforward factual message like the one on the first screenshot above with a link to airfrance.com and don’t update the site or account until you get some PR advice. Then take a look back at recent posts to see if there’s anything you might want to remove, even temporarily because it’s too lighthearted. Put yourself, as best you can, in the shoes of someone who has lost a family member to assess what is and isn’t appropriate. Do not attempt to provide a real-time update on the situation, leave that to the centralised information source on the main contingency site.
There’s a much harder question, which is should you allow comments and posts from users to continue? I think the answer to this one, is you should allow them to continue, but monitor very, very closely to see what is being said. There is a chance that they could create a misleading impression of what is actually happening, including much speculation about the causes or voices in the conversation that seem on the face of it to be informed, but actually are not speaking from a position of expertise or knowledge. If this is getting to the stage where there is serious misinformation, then taking the thread down would be an appropriate course of action – however, make it clear why you have done this (“to ensure that our customers get accurate and consistent information”) and repeat the simple statement of the facts and links to the official updated information, then close the page to new posts. And don’t forget your auto-responders; nothing worse than starting to follow Air France on Twitter to get a light-hearted auto-response.
Again, my sympathies, respect and thoughts go to all of the families of passengers and crew as well as those searching for flight AF447 and the staff of Air France at this difficult time.