How to Dismantle an F-Bomb

Oh, we can laugh about it today. When I had my telephone stolen back in November 2009 on the way to Dallas, and it was used to send out the following tweet over the athletic department feed:

"F*** you"

It took a rapid response and a pretty set series of actions to prevent first my unemployment and second to protect the reputation of the athletic department.

Golden hour response time is all the rage in PR these days, but it proved to be the difference maker. I was monitoring our feed through text alerts, and others monitor our feed as well. We never thought the monitoring would be used to attack a hacker.

The moment it happened, I knew that a rapid response was required. I called my two immediate supervisors and reminded them about the stolen phone. That part is crucial, because once the device went missing, I had reported it to supervisors, property control and the phone office.

I remembered that we had a press conference for men's basketball underway at the time, so I knew we had to respond quickly as the media certainly saw the tweet. What I didn't remember is that a football game management meeting was also underway. Imagine the internal audience surprise to that text.

Five minutes in, this was sheer reaction. An aggressively transparent series of tweets were sent. Acknowledging that an inappropriate message was sent, apologizing for the inappropriate message, reassuring that it was stolen and wouldn't happen again.

I was later asked if I thought a press release or other action was needed. No, I thought then and believe now that you respond in the medium -- in this case, Twitter. If it had been a message board, it would be there. This also was working within the social context of the error.

This was a crisis situation, at least of reputation, and you execute your crisis plan in such circumstances. Alert appropriate parties, take action to mediate the impact, survey the circumstances and then plan to prevent it from happening again.

Here we learned some important hard lessons about our technology. No matter how convenient, pairing mobile devices to any system is dangerous. The kids didn't get a bunch of passwords, they had just started sending the same seven-letter message to random numbers in the phone. And, they knew that if they sent a text to "40404", if the phone was paired with a Twitter account, it would automatically display the message.

Did you know that even if your phone is turned off, it may not be shut down for as much as four hours after the kill command is sent? So in this case, even though one of the critical technicians didn't answer their phone and the first alert of the event became a voice mail, it didn't matter.

Because I went aggressively into a plan that fulfilled those great four goals of ICS -- it became something we can study now. But what if it didn't, what if I lost my job over it?

Here's the difference between responsibility and fault. Having a teenager steal my phone and use it for a prank was not my fault. The phone, however, was my responsibility. It was issued to me. You can -- and must -- accept responsibility for events; you just don't have to be beaten down by fault.

Consider the unfortunate lives of Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short. They were the naval and military commanders of the Hawaiian Islands in 1941. Specifically, the island of O'ahu. Each executed the plan they were given. Kimmel lined the battleships up side-by-side to protect against submarine incursion into Pearl Harbor. Short moved all the aircraft and other key resources to the center of the airfields, wingtip to wingtip, to prevent saboteurs from breaching the fences.

Who would have expected the Imperial Naval Air Forces bombing Pearl? No one.

Yet they were relieved of duty, assumed to have been court-marshaled [corrected] and for decades public opinion for being at fault for our failure. Years later, we learn, they were indeed the responsible commanders, and fell on their swords, but they were not given all the info they needed and they were following orders. In 1999, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution to exonerate them.

In the end, you prepare for these kind of days by a series of events -- deaths, probation, firing on the low side; Final Fours and national championships on the up side -- and you learn from it all how to react under these kind of events.

In the end, they don't pay you for the good days; they pay you for the bad days. You work the good ones for free, an old colleague once said.

Keep Calm Carry On is the famous meme born of a plan to settle the British masses in the event of Nazi invasion of the home islands. It's a pretty good motto for anyone in this business.