How should Iron Mountain Research React to its recent bad publicity?

CNN Headline news “Time Warner Employee Data Missing: Information on 600,000 current, ex-workers lost by storage firm, Secret Service investigating.” This is not a good headline for the data storage company Iron Mountain; the company provides data storage solutions for many of America’s largest companies. Even worse for Iron Mountain, now that Google, the web’s leading search engine displays headline news in its search results, the top search results on Google for the keyword “Iron Mountain” is a link to a Boston business journal article, “Iron Mountain loses data on 600k Time Warner employees”. A customer might be searching for the Iron Mountain and see the article, many people use search engines to find the correct URL of a company rather than keying in the domain name directly into their browser.

The negative PR consequences of this incident with Time Warner have the potential to be large for Iron Mountain. Already both Time Warner and Iron Mountain’s stock price has dropped. How should Iron Mountain Research respond to this news? I think partly the company has already responded. If you search Iron Mountain’s newsroom, the company released a press release on April 21st, “Iron Mountain advises on Privacy Issues with Backup Tapes and Recommends Encryption,” the release states that the company recommends companies encrypt any backup tapes before even delivering them to their storage company.

I do have some suggestions for Iron Mountain, set up a crisis communications war room at their headquarters, and involve the web department in the communications room. Make sure that it is obvious for any journalists reviewing the Iron Mountain website where they can get information about the bad publicity generated by the incident. People will be needed to handle the increased call and e-mail volume, to do this, rope in the services of your marketing, and investor relations departments. I note that the Iron Mountain website is a database driven dynamic site, so they probably have a content management system backing up the site. This is critical in making sure that the communications team can get content out to journalists and customers quickly. With prior planning I would recommend Iron Mountain set up a crisis communications website for this particular issue, provide contacts, background material and links on how much a such incidents have been a part of the industry in the past. Open communication is the key, unfortunately Iron Mountain did not respond in the CNN article, although I don’t know if they were called, but they were able to respond to an inquiry to the Boston Business Journal.

Negative publicity in the security industry, or similar news sensitive industries like the power plant industry is going to happen. A good online PR crisis communications plan will help your company to respond and mitigate the consequences.