Imagethief loves watching companies hang themselves. Unless they are his clients, in which case he has fits watching them hang themselves because it means sleepless nights in the glow of the computer eating greasy dinners out of Styrofoam boxes.

Fortunately for me, China Railway 12th Bureau Group Company is not one of my clients. For one thing, if they were, I'd advise them to change their name. I had to look at the original article twice to transcribe it. I'm sorry, but if you're not a law firm you have no business having five nouns in your company name.

More importantly, they have just committed one of the great PR sins: the busted coverup. From AP, via BusinessWeek:

Police have detained 10 people in charge of building a new subway line for the 2008 Beijing Olympics after one of the project's tunnels collapsed, trapping six workers, state media said Friday.

*** 

Construction company China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co., was suspected of trying to cover up the accident and delaying rescue efforts that might have saved lives, Xinhua said.

Police have detained 10 people including the project supervisor and the tunnel's designers, Xinhua said. It did not give their names or say if they had been formally charged with any crime.

Xinhua said the construction company sealed the site immediately after the accident, confiscated employees' mobile phones and ordered people not to talk to police or media.

The company did not report the accident to city authorities until eight hours after it occurred, it said, citing unidentified Beijing officials.

You would think that after the great Songhua River disaster of '05 people would have learned their lessons about this. But it's hard to overcome those olde fashioned instincts, and probably even harder when you are working on a marquee project that is part of Beijing's pre-Olympic rectification program.

By definition, no one really knows how many successful coverups there are. However, I'd bet there really aren't many. It all comes down to the old adage that two people can keep a secret if one them gets a lead tattoo. I am not sure any peer-reviewed scholarly work has been done in this area, but I am convinced that as the number of people involved in a coverup goes up, the risk of it being blown increases far more than in linear fashion. I betting that risk increases as at least the square of the number of people involved.

So you can confiscate all the mobile phones you want, and you can order people not to talk, but sooner or later somebody will. And probably sooner. And even if they don't, people --family members and friends for instance-- tend to notice a lot of sudden deaths.

Now China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co. (or CR12BGC as I like to think of it) has two crises on its hands: the possibly negligent deaths of twelve workers, plus a mass arrest of its executives and supervisors. Instead of looking negligent, they now look negligent, sleazy and criminal. Congratulations! It's not easy to self-destruct that dramatically without being discovered trafficking in kiddie pr*n. Good luck explaining all this to the press.

Unless the government bans all coverage of the situation. This is China, after all, and the rules remain a little different. I realize also that CR12BGC is probably not the most progressive company when it comes to communication. But despite the high level of government intervention, China now has a scrappy, modern media that loves a good scandal. The sooner Chinese companies learn how to deal with this, the better things will go for them.

We PR people are widely unloved. There is some justification for this. As an industry we have a history of taking on unsavory clients and disagreeable jobs. But its also unfair in some ways. In crisis situations we spend a lot of time giving variations on the following straightforward advice to our clients:

  1. Don't lie.
  2. Be mindful of your legal risk and prudent in communication, but don't try to hide or distort the facts of what actually happened.
  3. Don't lie. (Again.)

Writ large or small, successful crisis communication is about clearly explaining your side of what happened and being publicly seen to take all practical steps to address the crisis and assist the people affected. You can't bring back the dead, but you can take care of the living, understand what went wrong, visibly cooperate with authorities and demonstrate a commitment to learning from mistakes. It might not do anything about your legal liability, but it will help your reputation and generally costs less in the long run than the alternatives. And if you do get prosecuted, a constructive approach looks a lot better in court than an attempted cover up.

Plus its hard to work a crisis when all your spokespeople are in jail.

Peril! 

Gasp! It's the China Railway 12th
Bureau Group Co!