My talk at last week's PRNewsOnline "How To" conference at the National Press Club went really well, unless you were the waiter that had to clean up the glass I broke on stage when I knocked it off the podium with my elbow. The speaker response sheets gave me some of the highest marks of anyone that day, so it had to be entertaining to somebody.
The instruction I was given was to teach people in 20 minutes how to communicate online in a crisis. I covered some of that, but more than that, I showed the many ways you could turn small disputes into full blown crises. I assumed that my audience figured out that these were mistakes of others you should learn from, not instructions on how to do it yourself.
The most important thing to learn about communications during a crisis online (or off, for that matter) is something I learned from Ben Popken from Consumerist.com. He said, during the Mad Magazine-Circuit City kerfuffle that the right response is usually:
- Admit you did a bad thing;
- Stop doing the bad thing; and
- Make a material gesture of apology.
Doing all three is harder than it looks, which is why I find crisis communications so often about changing a company's business practices, rather than about simply explaining those business practices more carefully.
Embedded below are the slides from the talk. Enjoy!
Great slideshow. I love all the "bonus points if you _____" pointers.
Posted by: Audrey Edmonds | December 09, 2009 at 03:48 PM