OUR TAKE -  Avoiding a Crisis of Trust     Lasting Impressions: Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. - Robert Louis Stevenson Last week's case study about a crisis of trust exploded into a great discussion about how organizations that initially deny a problem or take a slow crawl toward the truth often create problems greater than the one they had hoped to "manage" via calculated messaging. In the PR world, we often hear it called "spin." Consider that Watergate become more about the cover-up than the actual crime.   On the opposite side of the equation, we now see the ROI of a sincere apology and how "coming clean" early and completely is better business. Over the weekend, I came to learn from other health care providers that the story of one medical organization admitting mistakes is anything but a corner case. It is becoming more accepted as an industry norm. Good for them!   I have to admit I was a bit surprised when I did not receive any comments on the subject in the context of the current oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I plan to use the column this week to explore what might have been done differently to avoid the crisis of trust now facing corporations and governments.   Think back to the period of time when the focus shifted from a burning platform to an uncontrolled underwater pipe. What do you think the communication strategy should have been to avoid the crisis of trust? What's your take? I will share my thoughts tomorrow.   Gary Lemke, Publisher          Action Center         Free Subscription         Submit Content         Industry Events         Webcasts         Archive     Cool CRM                     NEW IN CRM   Article:    Measuring the ROI of Social CRM For some reason ROI is often a dirty word when used in the context of a Social CRM initiative. Metrics are abundant but dollars are often harder to find. It’s easy to point to a metric like number of followers, page impressions, percentage of positive sentiment etc but ultimately all of these are just leading indicators. Here are the tough questions. How much is this going to cost me? What cash flows will I get in return? How will this enable me to achieve my strategic objectives? What are the risks? How does the proposed course of action compare against other (viable) alternatives?(CustomerThink )   News:    Altitude Powers Conservative Party in UK General Election In the UK General Election, the Conservative Party achieved gains in the number of seats won. At the heart of Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), a Altitude interaction management solution helped efforts to contact potential voters, record voting intentions and other data that was then used to underpin campaigning activity. The Altitude team and the Conservatives worked together in the run up to and during the campaign to develop a campaign application using the Altitude Scripting Studio environment. This enabled the system to be set up to target specific seats, and to prompt the campaign caller for the elector’s views and intentions, depending on the target constituency and other factors. (Altitude )   News:    Siemens Contact Center Solution for Virtualized Environments Siemens Enterprise Communications announced the release of OpenScape Contact Center V8, the next generation of its contact center application which is now optimized for data center and virtualized environments. This solution enables deployment flexibility, simplified management and cost savings through server consolidation from both the server and desktop perspective. Customers now have the option of running OpenScape Contact Center V8 software on their VMware data center infrastructure, rather than on proprietary hardware at each location. (Siemens )   Article:    Your Community Is Almost Entirely Mute Kids today have smartphones, computers, and more social networking options than I can easily count. They never need to lose touch unless they choose to. They can even stay in touch with their teachers—several of my teacher friends report this is not uncommon—and that likely helps prevent May’s finely honed brain matter from regressing into September’s bowl of boiled cauliflower. Communities and social networks are driven by those who choose to be active in them, whether we’re talking about traditional or technology-enabled versions. The 90:9:1 split of lurkers, occasional contributors, and compulsive communicators—known as the 1 percent rule—seems a useful generalization, according to research by Michael Wu, the principal scientist of analytics at Lithium Technologies. (DestinationCRM )   Didn't read the last edition of CRMAdvocate? Click here to see what you missed.

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