Yes, Carnival, the World Is Flat

Dear Carnival Cruise Lines,

Please accept my kudos. Few companies have done a more spectacular job of executing consecutive PR blunders.

The critics have feasted on your quivering PR corpse. Generations of PR students will benefit from your remarkable mishandling of multiple shipboard disasters.

So many mistakes made! So many lessons to be learned!

Where to start?

32 passengers die on the Triumph. Cowardly captain flees like a rat. Crew members point fingers. Carnival CEO makes a handful of feeble tweets. The Titanic drifts powerless in the Gulf of Mexico. Irate passengers are treated to plastic bags, overflowing shit buckets and lack of running water. Carnival President publicly disputes passengers’ knee-deep-in-it accounts.

Really? REALLY? REALLY!? Is this the best a $16-billion company can do?

Lesson No. 1: Arrogant, disengaged and disingenuous executives are a PR disaster waiting to happen. Carnival’s top executives should care about, and engage with, their customers. They should go shipboard during a disaster or be fired.

Lesson No. 2: All companies should prepare carefully thought out crisis response and communications plans, and none more than cruise ships on open and dangerous seas. A good plan anticipates every possible contingency and creates an action-plan to respond.

Lesson No. 3: The world is flat, and corporations no longer control the message. This is the most important lesson of all.

The era of top-down communications controlled by media moguls and large corporations has all but ended. Broadcasting insincere platitudes and bromides over mass media is no longer effective at quieting the restless natives.

Armed with smart phones and mobile devices, the unhappy passengers on your ill-fated cruises became a battalion of citizen journalists. They tweeted, Facebooked and otherwise fired their dissatisfaction into a collective cyberspace groan heard round the globe. You could not compete.

In his book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman explains this tectonic shift in communications. In the past, the man who owned the printing press controlled the message. Today, anyone with a smart phone can send a message to anyone at any time in any place. Collectively, the world’s new “citizen journalists” can organically shape a message at lightning speed. (Remember the Arab Spring?)

Yes, Carnival, the world is flat, and unless you get it, your Ship of PR is going to sink again—and again.

There’s only one course left for you to chart.

Listen—really listen—to your customers and be responsive to their concerns. Maybe then, when they tweet about your next shipboard disaster, it will be to tell the world they were happy with how you handled it.