BulletProofBlog the blog on crisis communications

As a featured speaker at the University of Nevada's Journalism Week in early March, I may very well have learned more from the students than they learned from me.

The audience, split between aspiring public relations and journalism professionals, naturally had many questions. Like most young people preparing to enter the communications field, they were curious about how to identify and prepare appropriate messages and how to select the right messengers. Given the current economic environment, they especially wanted to learn the techniques of thinking like a stakeholder in a business crisis.

But it was the students' appetite for information about the new Era of Accountability that was most remarkable and instructive.

Theirs is the generation of Facebook, blogs, YouTube and Twitter, so it was fitting that the first question was about these digital media and their applications in crisis. How is Corporate America coping, they wondered, with the transparency these new ways of communicating have forced upon them? Companies know how to use the Internet to market products, they noted, but do they understand how to use blogs and tweets to demonstrate accountability and highlight leadership when times are at their worst? Do corporate executives realize they have only a day or two to tell their side of a story before critics bury them in an avalanche of information that can destroy a company in weeks?

These young communications professionals - like an increasing number of Americans - hunger for transparency and accountability. They know that the obfuscation and no-comments we' ve seen during this financial crisis have seldom succeeded in the past. And they believe, correctly, that digital media offer an ideal platform for taking crisis communications in the opposite - and much needed - direction.

It' s a new world out there for communications professionals. The students at the University of Nevada showed me that they are more than ready to inherit it.