Crisis communications tips from British media
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 at 19:39 Phew... back home and blogging at last.
Monday I was in Paris speaking about new media to French PR colleagues and yesterday I was again speaking but this time in London at the PR Week conference entitled "Taking the drama out of a crisis". (This was in the context of my New Media function at IBM).
Interesting notes from yesterday came from the media panel consisting of Gary Duffy from BBC News Interactive, Jamie Angus from The Today Programme and Simon Buck from Sky News. Here's what I jotted down, in no specific order or importance - all relate to crisis communications:
- "No vacuum please"; in a crisis situation constant updates are needed - even if no major changes in the situation take place.
- Provide facilities - if possible - for TV and camera crews (parking for satellite TV vans for instance).
- Your best spokesperson is not necessarily the CEO.
- As a PRO you have to know how a newsroom works - inside out.
- Use national news-wires and news agencies.
- Know your key contacts - not necessarily reporter - at major media. These could be news dispatchers, redaction secretaries etc...
- Use graphics and multimedia where possible (an image is like a zillion words...) to explain complex issues.
Other aspects which I find very interesting in Crisis Management is the human care aspect during and after a crisis. I read a very good book about this topic called "Blindsided" by Bruce Blythe last year.
At the conference I learnt that since the London bombings, Transport of London has a general stress management system in place which helps teams in the daily stress of work during non crisis situations thus preparing them to better deal with "real stress" during a crisis.
The Paris conference was more general and covered media relations/new media in non crisis situations. I was invited by Guillaume du Gardier from Edelman and it was nice to meet up with a fellow PR blogger again.
One thing that shocked me (please tell me if I am naive) was that I saw prime time news coverage from a PR launch of Yahoo's latest dating site... Not the topic was shocking - but the fact that on the news someone was interviewed that at a later stage was identified as having been "casted" for that specific shoot.
Now I could have misunderstood so I'll be checking the facts on this one.
And a final note on the "new media" savviness of PR colleagues in both capitals... At both conferences the majority of colleagues were not monitoring the blogosphere, most of them were not participating through blogging and just a handful understood how RSS could be used in PR work.
PS: Just in - "Web fuelling crisis in politics" from the BBC news site. Here's an extract:
"What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It's basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are."
Have fun....
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Reader Comments (3)
Were there any discussions of how to manage media collaboration in the event that the crisis or disaster restricts use of one or more electronic media?
- Dennis
No, unfortunately not... At least not when I was there.
But any good crisis plan should include "runners"; people standing by to run with messages from on point to the other.
Now as far as media are concerned I can't imagine how it would work if all electronic communications would shut down.
On the other hand, there must be cases somewhere... Good point. Thanks.