Bulletin No. 8 | March – April 2002
COMMUNICATIONS
Crisis Communication from A to Z
Agnes Huff, Ph.D has the following suggestions that can help you manage communications in the event of crisis and protect your company’s reputation.
- Always prepare for a variety of crisis situations
- Be realistic about the outcome expected
- Communicate with empathy, compassion and care
- Develop a communications plan for your team and train them
- Enlist the help of others internally and externally
- Form an inclusive communications team
- Get the crisis behind you as quickly as possible
- Help the media as much as you can
- Incorporate internet strategies in your plan
- Just do the right thing
- Keep your cool. Stay in control
- Look before you leap or you will be in big trouble
- Maintain an appropriate sense of humor throughout the crisis
- Never go off the record
- Open the door to two way communications
- Prepare your 3 key messages before your briefings and stick to them
- Questions all potential crisis strategies and ask ‘What if’
- Respect and respond to media inquiries quickly and professionally
- Stop to talking when you are finished
- Think before you speak
- Underestimate the power of media at your own risk
- Verify all information – no matter how reliable the source
- Work hard to coordinate, cooperate and solve issues a they arise
- Xerox paper so you don’t lose critical information
- Your reputation depends on how you handle the media. And last of all …
- Zero tolerance for media distortion, inaccuracy and bad press
Presented in PRSA International Conference, Anaheim, CA
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Profiling Indonesian Practitioners
Public relations should be an approach more than a technique.
It is a framework that ensures consistency and maintains transparency, not a means to hide uncomfortable facts as a result of management defect.
- A study by W. J. Keegan reported in The Administrative Science Quarterly in 1994 of the information sources drawn on by senior management found out that ‘public relations people are good sources of competitive information because they hear so much. Even if they are not directly involved, they are in the grapevine’.
- A survey of 292 respondents (Ananto, 1997) found out that the majority of respondents were in-house practitioners (85%), educators and instructors (4%), independent consultants (6%), observers and others (5%). The respondent worked in private institutions (49%), state-owned companies (12%), educational institutions (11%), PR consultant (10%), government offices (7%) and others.
- Another study (Ananto, 2001) of 144 respondents found out that the respondents worked in private institutions (48%), state-owned companies (32%) and multinational corporations (20%). 73% of the respondents had internal and external publics to handle, 16% handle internal and only 11% handle external public. Working as Staff (52%), Manager (39%), and Director (9%), the respondents were in-house practitioners (66%), academia (18%), Observer (9%) and Consultant (7%). Length of service in public relations positions range from 5 – 10 years (36%), less than 5 years (30%), 10 – 15 years (21%) and more than 15 years (13%).Most of the respondents came from social science as much as 84% and only 16% had acquired exact sciences. The monthly salary ranges from less than 3 million rups (16%), between 3 – 5 million rups (50%) and 34% of the respondents were salaried more than 6 million rups.
- Both studies indicated that the higher the responsibility of a of practitioner is holding in a management position, the greater the demand a person has to acquire management science. It also found out that the more strategic the position of a practitioner in management position, the lesser tendency towards female practitioners as perceived to be the dominant figure in public relations practice.
(Ananto, 2001)
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