Consumers expect instant gratification online. They want what they want now. If your website fails to load in 3 seconds you're literally driving people to your competitors.

What you need to know is that a slow mobile experience robs you of potential sales. You’ve lost users enthusiasm of the moment when your site fails to load and become usable within 3 seconds. When your mobile site is slow, people will leave and find your competitors. It’s called abandonment. Here’s how it works: someone finds your site then leaves in frustration (or anger) because your site won’t load fast enough. Because they are unable to get what they want through your site, they ‘go back’ on their browser, finding what they want through your competitor.

According to Google, ‘it’s a challenge most businesses struggle with. In fact, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load’.
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We humans simply don’t have the attention span we once did. It’s time to stop making excuses for your website and embrace our mobile ecosystem. Did you know that over 40% of shoppers report that they prefer to complete their entire shopping experience on mobile – from research to purchase.

To help marketers improve page load speed, Google has developed two tools that give marketers better ways to illustrate the importance of mobile site speed.

  Speed Scorecard – shows how your site ranks against the competition on mobile
  Impact Calculator – shows the potential revenue impact of speed on your bottom line

Google announced these two new benchmarking tools at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday, February 26th 2018.

We hope you put these fantastic new tools to work improving your users mobile experience soon.  

​To survive a public brand scandal, minimize fallout and recover customer trust communication has to be prompt and compassionate.

​It was a chicken joke of epic proportions, but it took a while for the punch line to land.

For nearly two weeks last month, nearly 900 KFC franchises in the U.K. were unable to obtain fresh chicken parts thanks to a cock-up with the company’s new delivery firm.

KFC U.K. needed to acknowledge the problem, and it knew that the usual bland corporate apology would not satisfy its hangry customers. So the U.K. subsidiary’s agency of record, Mother London, decided to go extra crispy. It took out full-page ads in two major dailies succinctly expressing what company executives, franchise owners and its finger-lickin’ fans must have been feeling.

By turning its familiar three-letter logo into a playful vulgarity (FCK), KFC both “acknowledged the completeness of its crisis and used subtle appropriate humor to show us it got where customers’ heads were at,” says Will McInnes, CMO for Brandwatch, a social media listening platform.

But KFC U.K.’s response didn’t end there. It used its Twitter feed adroitly, apologizing to customers, answering questions and offering cheeky updates. It set up a website where chicken lovers could find out when their favorite restaurants would reopen. Most important, the restaurant chain did not fall into the trap of offering excuses, pointing fingers or cowering until the crisis had passed.

“The natural instinct is to be defensive and go into some long-winded explanation about what went wrong in the supply chain,” says Mike Hatcliffe, a reputation and risk consultant for RockDove Solutions, makers of a mobile crisis management platform. “Instead, they took ownership of it and got there quickly before social media chatter defined the story for them.”

To survive a public brand scandal, minimize fallout and recover customer trust communication has to be prompt and compassionate.

Egg on Their Faces
KFC U.K.’s tongue-in-cheek crisis management strategy was intelligent, timely and human. But that makes it a rare bird.

Over the last few years, brands like United Airlines, Equifax, Volkswagen, Wells Fargo and Uber, among others, have endured major public scandals that were made worse by the companies’ tone-deaf, ham-fisted responses.

When passengers have been captured on video being dragged from one of your planes, when you’ve leaked the financial records of 150 million people, or systematically faked automobile emission tests, or created millions of phantom bank accounts, or fostered an environment of rampant sexual harassment, the worst things you can do are deny, blame the victims or hide behind bland policy statements. And yet, that’s exactly what these brands did, at least at first.

“I can count on one hand crises that have been well handled over the last three or four years,” says Paul Holmes, founder of The Holmes Report, which tracks the public relations industry and publishes an annual list of the worst PR crises. “But that may be because when they’re handled well they never become a crisis. The brand’s response is a bigger contributor to the overall result than the initial problem.”

Why Are So Many Major Organizations Still So Bad At This?

“Very senior executives are often insulated from what’s going on around them,” says Irv Schenkler, professor of management communication at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “Instead of acting on data, they sometimes react instinctively, trying to create a wall about their brand to protect it.”

But crisis communications is not rocket science. There are five basic rules each organization needs to follow, says Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management.
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Communication has to be prompt and compassionate, he says. It needs to be honest and informative. And in the age of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, it needs to be interactive—organizations need to quickly and efficiently answer questions stakeholders will have.

Yet for many, the first instinct is to run and hide.
“Playing ostrich is a favorite among a lot of organizations,” he says. “And you need to remember when you’re playing ostrich what part of you is still exposed.”

The Need for Speed
Technology has rewritten the rules of crisis management. Every smartphone and social media account can be used to capture scandals as they occur, spread the news and scold the transgressors. Many large organizations are simply not keeping pace, says McInnes.

“Social has accelerated and amplified how any brand has to respond to a crisis,” he says. “The stakes are higher, the pace is faster, the drama is greater. It’s like everything an old-school communicator used to expect when managing a brand crisis, but with all the worst bits turned up to 11.”

The speed at which scandals travel, in turn, influences how quickly consumers expect organizations to respond.

“Consumers expect big lumbering organizations to dance elegantly and in time,” McInnes adds. “They expect fast responses, transparent answers and a really subtle reading of the room. Those are a tough ask for major brands.”

Some brands do better than others. Speedy apologies helped contain the damage for Pepsi and Unilever after both stumbled last year with ads that badly missed their marks.

Last April, Pepsi released a Kendall Jenner ad in which the she interrupts a photo shoot to join a protest full of ethnically diverse people, then quells a potential riot by handing a cop a can of soda.

Loosely based on the Black Lives Matter movement, the two-and-a-half minute video provoked a scathing social media backlash, a skit on Saturday Night Live and even a few minutes of tearful drama on Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Pepsi pulled the ad less than 24 hours after it debuted and issued a mea culpa (including an apology to Jenner), which still failed to smooth the ruffled feathers of many activists.

Similarly, Unilever’s Dove was forced to fend off allegations of “racial insensitivity” after it debuted a Facebook ad last October showing a dark-skinned woman removing her shirt to reveal a very pale woman beneath—as if using Dove Body Wash would scrub away all that troublesome pigment.

Social media users were quick to point out similarities to more overtly racist ad campaigns from a less enlightened time. Dove quickly pulled the ad and posted a brief apology on Facebook.

But these self-inflicted wounds still needed time to heal. It took nearly six months for Pepsi to recover its pre-Jenner Buzz score, according to the YouGov BrandIndex, which polls 4,500 consumers each day on their positive or negative perceptions of brands. Dove recovered in roughly two months.

And many brands aren’t nearly as media savvy as Pepsi and Unilever, says Hatcliffe, a former senior executive at Ketchum and Ogilvy Public Relations.

“You’d be astonished at how many companies have a crisis management plan that pre-dates social and digital media and is sitting in a three-ring binder on a shelf created by a guy who left the company five years ago,” he says. “You’d think major organizations would have a crisis plan, put their teams through drills and update it every year, but that’s more rare than you’d think.”

Values are Key
The best way for brands to protect against a crisis is to have a clear set of values and encourage employees to act on them, says Holmes.

“There are three questions you need to ask your employees,” he adds. “Do you understand our values? Do you believe management lives up to our values? Do you feel personally empowered to make decisions based on those values? If employees answer yes to all three, you’re pretty well insulated.”

​By Dan Tynan | March 11, 2018
This story first appeared in the March 12, 2018, issue of Adweek magazine.

Get Your Plans in Order
Each crisis may come as a surprise, but your response should not be. Smart organizations have a crisis management plan in place that involves every aspect of the organization—including HR, legal and technical.

“Ninety-five percent of the crises I’ve seen in my 30-plus year career could have been completely preventable with advance planning,” says Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management.

That plan should also include media training for executives, pre-approved responses for public relations and social media, and regular tabletop exercises.

“You need to look at systems that might preclude you from responding correctly,” he adds. “For example, can your website handle 500 times its normal volume of traffic? The answer is almost always no. So if you can’t add bandwidth on the fly very quickly you’ll have an extra level of crisis.”

Triage the Problem
Everything that blows up on social media doesn’t necessarily constitute a crisis. Organizations need to consider three factors before they react, says Irv Schenkler, professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Does it severely affect the organization’s normal workflow or distract senior management? Will it seriously impact the bottom line? Can it tarnish the organization’s image or reputation in the eyes of key stakeholders?

“You can have one or two of them and be fine,” he says. “If it satisfies all three components, a company needs to think strategically about how to respond and what tactics to use.”

Respond Quickly on Social
Once you’ve determined you need to respond, time is of the essence. Here social media can be your ally, allowing you to quickly disseminate information while appearing to be in control of the situation.

“An immediate social media response is key,” says Chris Britton, chief operating officer for RockDove Solutions, makers of the In Case of Crisis software platform. “In most cases your goal should be to respond within an hour. If you let too much time pass, a lot of negativity can fill that void.”

This also means organizations need to dedicate resources to monitoring social media 24/7, as well as a rapid response team empowered and trained to handle crises without waiting for approval from on high.

Be Honest, Transparent and Direct
Denying a negative report, minimizing the details or blaming others just makes a crisis worse when the real story comes out later. The best strategy is to own your mistakes, apologize to the affected parties, take steps to demonstrate how you’ll do better in the future and move on.

A well-executed crisis response can actually boost your brand image over the long haul, says Brandwatch CMO Will McInnes.

“It’s not if a crisis will happen, it’s when,” he says. “Brands need to accept that they are in a constant dialogue with their market. Campaigns will go wrong. Focus group-tested messages will fall flat. Employees will misbehave. But consumers will accept mistakes when the response feels appropriate.”

By Dan Tynan | March 11, 2018
This story first appeared in the March 12, 2018, issue of Adweek magazine.