Vanoc’s Damage Control

Digital communications
Life in the digital fishbowl can make business more transparent than some may prefer.

Damage control in the digital age, as Vanoc recently learned, is a very public affair.

This week’s Vancouver Sun story Vanoc leaks CBC documents to Globe and CTV to shape criticism is an example of how transparent our actions are in today’s extremely public digital fishbowl.

Briefly: CBC TV’s Fifth Estate was investigating problems at the Whistler Sliding Centre, where the Georgian luger was killed during the Olympics. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the CBC obtained controversial memos that suggest Vanoc knew of serious problems at the track, prior to the games.

Vanoc’s former VP of communications became alarmed about the CBC’s upcoming story, and in a move to take the heat out of their exclusive, leaked the FOI documents to competitors CTV and The Globe and Mail. They didn’t give the documents to other media outlets, or give CBC a heads-up.

The goal was two-fold: To throw cold water on CBC’s big story, and to influence coverage with media outlets that were potentially more friendly than CBC (CTV was the Olympic broadcaster, and The Globe and Mail has the serial rights to Vanoc president John Furlong’s new book).

Vanoc did the right thing trying to manage a damaging story, but it was inevitable that the news would become immediately and noisily public. A more effective move would have been to release all the documents to all media, at the same time.

In the Wikileaks age, covert operations stand little chance of success. The best strategy is to be transparent (remember, you are in a fishbowl) and fess up early and obviously. You’ll endure some short-term pain but people forgive and forget. Unfortunately for Vanoc, their communications efforts will probably be the focus of the media telescope for some time.