More than a month ago (yes, I’m a little behind) the local chapter of the American Advertising Federation hosted a Crisis PR Panel where they talked about what it takes to do Crisis PR in this ever changing world.  I was going to do a whole recap on it, but since I was the one handling the Twitter feed, I’m going to take the easy route and repost what I wrote here.  For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is always read from the bottom up.  🙂

Come back down here after you finish. 

Additional comments:

-The I-4 Ultimate Project is going to be a massive undertaking.  To learn more about it and how it will personally affect your commute, visit here.

-Tim Fisher, with ACME brand studio (and the Tim referenced in the first tweet), gave a great story about how Blake Shelton responded when he was asked to express his own political views.  All of the brand statisticians said he should say “x” because it’s what would help grow his brand, but he didn’t agree with it, so he said what he felt was with his heart in order to remain authentic to himself.  One must always do this in order to never look like you waiver because of what’s going on in the polls.

-I also attended the Visit Orlando Annual Workshop in August, and Edelman, a Crisis PR firm with a branch in Orlando, came and talked (which is how I got Joel –  the @JCSvoice –  to then speak on the AAF-O panel) about crisis communication and reputation management.  They gave examples of how companies handled different situations, such as when the girl lost her feet in a roller coaster at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom, how the GLBT community reacted to the Sultan of Brunai’s comments about homosexuality and how that affected the Beverly Hills Hotel, and how the Domino’s pizza employees violated all of the those health code violations and posted them on Twitter.  It was very fascinating and the best practices/key takeaways they all boiled down to were:

-Identify and asses all of your risks honestly; it is important to know where you’re vulnerable.

-Then, once you know your vulnerabilities, get your house in order.  Identify all of the ways to plug holes.  And most importantly, understand what your vendor and suppliers’ crisis plans are and how they’ll help you if they get you in trouble.

-Figure out how to put the fire out as soon as possible.  As someone said in my morning sales meeting today, if you have to eat a frog, eat it fast.

-And after the crisis is over, debrief and re-asses to rebuild your plan.

Reputation is all a company or an individual has.  As Warren Buffet said, “Lose money and I will forgive you, but lose even a shred of reputation and I will be ruthless.”