Okay, crisis has just hit, you have quickly assembled your team, you have a message. Now what do you do? Well, you want to be able to get out in front of reporters. So it doesn't appear as though you're hiding. You don't want them chasing you down. You don't want them at your gates at your door knocking and you're saying, Oh, hold on, wait a minute, we're not ready.
And that's why it's crucial that you prepare that you have a plan in advance and that you know, how you're going to do this even before a crisis occurs. If there's some major event that's going on at your business, your office, your organization, you need to be able to get a message together and speak to the media within an hour. The days are long gone, when you can wait a day or two or three. Now it's interesting people look back at the Tylenol scandal several decades ago, and often put that as a picture of the ideal way of handling a crisis and for its time They did an excellent job, rebuild trust and tie on all but people forget, they took 24 hours before responding to the media that will not cut it. And at modern era of bloggers talking instantaneously cable news looking for every little morsel.
By the second, you simply do not have the luxury to kind of sit back, send it to your law firm and wait a day for an opinion before you figure out what to say. You've got to react quickly, you've got to come up with your message, your spokesperson has to be ready, and you've got to be able to deliver that message. Now if there's a huge explosion of fire, something going on and there's something visual, then TV reporters are going to be there I would recommend, have a spokesperson there at the place and your spokesperson during the crisis needs to be the CEO or the top person in that organization. If it's a state Going through some major problems, that's got to be the governor. If the United States is going to war, then it has to be the president of the United States. If you're a one person consulting, shop, it's got to be here.
It can't be a hired PR person that you hire. It's got to be the top ranking person. It can't be seen as just a PR flack or a senior vice president. It has to be seen as someone truly accountable. You've got to be able to react quickly. I would send a statement out within 60 minutes, I would let people know we're going to have a press conference.
We're going to take all your questions. Now. We're not necessarily going to have answers to every question, but we will answer every question sometimes the answer is simply, I don't know. We'll let you know once we figure it out and find out right now. Our focus is on stopping the fire containing the problem finding missing employees So you've got to be able to react quickly. If it's a huge crisis, I would recommend calling a press conference and you can call it a press availability.
You can simply alert all the media and say, our CEO is going to be standing at the corner of fifth and Elm in front of our office or factory will be able to answer all your question, call it whatever you want. But you've got to make it easy for reporters, to find you. And to be able to ask you questions, you also need to let them know you're going to be having regular updates. Now on some crisis, depending on the situation, there might not be anything new and there might not be that much media interest. After a few hours or even a day or so maybe it's okay to say we'll update you tomorrow. But you need to let reporters know if you need us.
Here's our phone number. Here's my cell phone. I'm the CEO you need to give it to people. So there's not an information void the danger you have in a crisis. is there's lots of confusion, people are upset, maybe someone was hurt, all of your enemies are going to come out and attack you. So if there is a void if there's a black hole of information, it's going to be filled by someone, if not you, reporters have to put this story into their media outlets.
So it's extraordinarily risky. to just say, well, we're not ready yet, or we're gonna have a press conference tomorrow. Huge, huge, huge mistake, you've got to have a message. You have to be seen as accountable. If reporters feel like they have to chase you down, or that you're trying to control them. If you say, well, we're only going to take questions for five minutes and then the important CEO has to dash off.
That's going to anchor them, annoy them and they will go out of their way to make you look bad. To make it look like you're hiding that you're secretive, that in fact, you're ashamed or embarrassed to talk about what's really going on. Not. So you need to be transparent, as much as possible. You need to let people know what's going on. And you need to let people know what you're doing to try to make things better.
Nobody's perfect. problems occur in every organization, big, small, doesn't matter if you are running a federal government, division with millions and millions of employees, a private sector business of 100,000 employees, or a one person consulting shop, everybody makes mistakes from time to time. A crisis can hit any business, it's how you react to that crisis. That's so crucial. That's where people are judging you. They're really figuring out is this person trustworthy?
Is this organization trustworthy? Because if you make a mistake, and you handle it the right way, and sometimes that can include an apology, people will forgive you. But if they think you make mistakes, and they're on purpose, and it's For nefarious reasons, and then you're not accountable. You will never, ever, ever get that trust back. You'll never get your reputation back. And that's why how you handle yourself, how you make yourself available to the media is absolutely crucial.
I would opt in favor of making it as easy as possible for the media want to talk to you to talk to you. That means holding press conferences. It means returning every single phone call. And I mean quickly. It means if somebody wants to talk to you through Skype doing that, it's not the time to say oh, no, we don't do that. And one word here, I'm going to make people at least some people angry.
If you're the CEO, and you're a publicly traded company, of course, you have to listen to your chief legal counsel. Of course, you don't want to be stating things that are blatantly illegal. And I understand you don't want to be admitting culpability for something bad that's happened and setting yourself up for billion dollar lawsuits that could bankrupt two, or perhaps be used as an admission of a felony and you end up in prison. I understand that you definitely need to listen to your lawyers. However, anybody, a CEO or anyone else who listens to an attorney for public relations, advice, how to deal with the media, in my view is as crazy and as irrational as somebody who is charged with murder, and is in front of a judge and then relies exclusively on a PR person's legal advice. You would never do that you would be too afraid of getting the death sentence.
The death penalty if you only had a non lawyer, a PR person representing you in a court of law, but when it's a crisis, a media crisis, you're in a court of public opinion you No need to worry about saying anything publicly, they can set you up for legal problems. But you also have to be surprisingly interested and concerned with the court of public opinion. And this is where, unfortunately, many lawyers are completely ignorant. Because if a lawyer tells you, you have to say no comment, you can't talk to the media. And there's story after story after story, just saying, you know, Chairman Walker is so arrogant and guilty, he refuses to comment to the media, that might keep me out of jail. But if all of my customers, all of the clients, all the employees think that we're doing something so evil, so horrible here, that I lose all my customers, my revenues go to zero and I go bankrupt.
Guess what a lawyer can say. A lawyer can say, Well, I did my job. I kept you out of jail. Mr. Walker, HIPAA, I'm bankrupt. My business is gone. Not my problem.
That can be the lawyers response. So, yeah, I'm not trying to pick up this PR person, communications counselor versus lawyer. But I do need you to realize, if you're in a larger company, and you're listening to attorneys, and there are legal ramifications to your crisis, certainly listen to them. But do not under any circumstances let the lawyers be the final arbiter of whether to talk to the media. Because what lawyers don't understand quite often is you can hold a press conference, you can do an interview. And if someone asked you a question that's dealing with complicated legal strategies that could get you into trouble.
You can always just say, I'd be very happy to answer that question in greater detail. Once that has been resolved. And the judge gives us the okay to talk about it. There's nothing wrong with saying that. That's infinitely better than say no car on the advice of legal counsel, I cannot comment on that. If you do that people think of you as a mobster, a criminal, a crooked politician who no longer cares about public opinion, but is only trying to stay out of jail.
So you cannot under any circumstances, just say No comment. I understand there are times when you can't comment. But you don't ever literally have to have the words. No comment, or I can't comment. come out of your mouth. Please put.
There's a lot of wiggle room in some of this crisis communications, but that is one of them. Someone asked yourself and you can't comment on, you can say what I can comment on is and then talk about something that's relevant this way. You won't seem defensive. You won't seem nervous. You won't seem like you're hiding something and you seem like You're actually trying to help the public and help the media. that's critically important.
Now, these days, there's so many tools you have for communicating, I would recommend using every tool imaginable that would include having a short video statement just like I'm talking to you, from your CEO, or whoever is the head of the organization with your message. I wouldn't make it long. You certainly don't have to limit it just to 30 seconds. But try to make it two or three minutes state what's happened. State what you're doing, state, how you're trying to help the situation, state who you're working with, if it's local fire officials or with regulators looking into the organization, but do it in a way where it's obvious to people you're not hiding, that you're trying to communicate. You're trying to let people know what's going on, and you're open for questions.
If it's a video let people know they can post their accounts. And right here, in the description on your website or on your YouTube, post this information on your blog, post it on your Facebook page, post it every tweet about it, get your message out what hurts so many organizations is they take this siege mentality and they go into hiding. Oh, that's bad. This is bad news. We don't want to talk about it. Well guess what, if it's a crisis affecting your organization, you don't have any influence on that you don't have a choice.
The topic is going to be discussed. And it's either going to be with you or without you. And if you're not a part of the conversation, then that gives more space in every story for your enemies, saying not only do you do horrible things, but you're also clueless, and you're hiding and you're hiding because you're guilty. Why would that ever be better? There's this mistaken notion, a lot of corporate executives And attorneys that if you just refused to comment, somehow the reporter can't do the story. Well, nothing could be further from the truth when it's a crisis.
Now you can occasionally get away with that if a reporter just calls you and says, Well, I'm doing it friend story on all the corporations outsourcing to China. Maybe you don't want to be a part of that. Not the end of the world. But if there's a crisis going on about your organization, charges of illegality, a fire some aspect of physical destruction. There's no way there isn't going to be a story just because you refused to comment. What will happen is there's going to be a quote, if it's a tech story that you refuse to comment with the implication you're clearly guilty.
If it's a TV reporter, they will be standing outside your headquarters in front of the gate saying, you know, we asked repeatedly for a comment from the CEO but he was so arrogant in guilty and ashamed, he refused to come out and talk to us. They won't say it quite like that. But that will be the clear implication. You've got to have a strategy for reaching out to people, it includes holding the press conference, having someone taking the phone calls, coming up with a quick video and the video can be done by someone simply holding up a cell phone capturing two minutes a video of your CEO or you explaining what happened and posting that to your website on YouTube. And promoting it on your Facebook and Twitter channels. Doesn't mean stopping everything and hiring a makeup artist and going to a TV studio.
These days, you need to use every single tool manager or because other people are going to be talking to you in all these channels. They're going to be talking about you on Twitter. They'll be talking about you on Facebook, so you've got to have your message out there and when a crisis hits That's not the time to think. Do we ever set up that Facebook page? Do we have it YouTube channel we were talking about? You've got to figure that out right now.
So you've got to figure out where you're going to hold a press conference. Do you have the media list of reporters who already follow you, and especially ones in your community? That includes TV, radio, print? And do you know the person in your organization who actually controls the Twitter channel, the Facebook page, the blog, all of that has to be gathered in advance. So when there's a crisis, and you've got your message, you can be pushing it out. You want reporters to think Okay, I got it, you know, you're very helpful Enough already.
You don't want them to think they're hiding. I mean, they hear the hide out in the parking lot there. Let me get to the CEOs house so I get jumped out of the bushes, because that's the only way to get it. You don't want to make this a game of cat and mouse. You Want to make? The reporters feel like okay, this bad thing happened but you know what these people are really going beyond the call of duty.
They're really being transparent. They're answering all their questions. Let's treat them fairly. That's the response you want to get from reporters. The only way to do that is by giving them lots of information in every format anytime they want it. Again and again and again.