WOOSH! BIRD? PLANE? NO...FAST-MOVING PR CRISIS
A PR crisis has never been a pleasant or easy thing to experience. But once upon a time, at least the speed at which a crisis developed in the public arena could be described as a ‘brisk walk’. There was time to identify the issue, strategise about a response and then casually call an afternoon conference to release the information to the media with the hope of stopping the spread of any damaging or incorrect information.
Today, however, a crisis can accelerate at a rate equivalent to Shanghai’s Maglev bullet train. The Internet enables both traditional media outlets with an online presence (such as newspapers) and new media forms (blogs, forums) to update and deliver news as soon as it happens.
Like never before, planning for a crisis is of critical importance. Knowing key media outlets and contacts, understanding the public perception of your business (in both crisis and non-crisis periods) and building a relationship with important media are crucial. And today, even more importantly, continual media monitoring must be in place to make certain you’re aware of and responding to any negative tremor before it has the chance to turn into a full blown earth rocking PR issue. Take, for instance, the case of Kryptonite bike locks, whose case was recently discussed in a paper published by CustomScoop media monitoring service. In 2004, an allegation was made regarding one of its locks (the Evolution 2000), which could apparently be picked with a simple ballpoint pen. The claim appeared on a message board on a biking website. Word quickly spread through the blogging community, and within days a video was made actually demonstrating that the lock could be ‘cracked’. Eleven days after the initial blog, The New York Times ran the story – proof that Consumer Generated Media is certainly not to be managed lightly.
CGM needs to be considered in PR strategy, and companies must understand how information is disseminated through these less traditional channels. If you have any doubt about the growth of the weblog world and the number of people expressing their feelings online then visit http://www.wefeelfine.org/ for an eye-opening experience. Every few minutes (since August 2005), this system has been searching the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". Thanks to the IdeaFarm for bringing this interesting website to our attention.
