If you think your company is unlikely to ever be in the full glare of the media during a crisis you should probably think again (and quickly).
When people think of the term ‘crisis comms’ they can fall into the trap of focusing on the huge organisations which have endured long-term PR disasters. BP’s handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is an often used example while Volkswagen’s emissions scandal is a more recent case study.
So perhaps it is understandable that crisis media management may not be at the top of the priority list for some businesses which possibly don’t have such a high profile.
But in reality a crisis can hit any organisation at any time regardless of size, sector, previous media exposure or nature of their work. And it can come in many shapes and sizes including product recalls, redundancies, fatal accidents and even the loss of sensitive equipment.
Take the recent case of Security Search Management and Solutions. Chances are that unless you used their somewhat specialist services you would not have heard of them before the start of this month.
And I suspect they felt they were not likely to ever feature on the media’s radar – at least not the national and international media and certainly not in a story leading the television news bulletins.
But then they accidentally left a training device - a mock-up of a pipe bomb - inside Old Trafford which caused 76,000 people to be ordered to leave the stadium before Manchester United’s final game of the season.
It was the first time a Premier League game had been abandoned for security reasons and once it emerged the ‘bomb’ had been left over from a training exercise huge numbers of journalists were naturally desperate to track down and speak to the people behind that training - Security Search Management and Solutions.
So how did they handle this unexpected media scrutiny?
Well initially the response seemed slow with newspapers reporting there was ‘no response’ from the company the day after the abandonment.
When Chris Reid, the company’s managing director, did appear before the media later that same day he appeared open and honest and made no attempt to deflect blame or distance his company from the issue.
Reading a statement to the journalists who had gathered outside his home, he took ‘full responsibility’ for the incident.
He said: “This mistake is entirely mine. I have to take full responsibility for leaving the training item behind.
“I’m absolutely devastated that a lapse in my working protocols has resulted in many people being disappointed, frightened and inconvenienced. Nothing I can say will rectify that.
Mr Reid gave a detailed account of how the mistake happened and added that he hoped he would still be able to use his ‘knowledge and experience’ in this area in future.
From this fairly controlled start he then went to face, and try to respond to, a large number of questions from the gathered media. This was clearly a less comfortable experience than simply reading a statement and a more experienced and media trained spokesperson would have looked to have restricted the questions and brought the impromptu press conference to an end much more quickly. He could also have thought about where he was standing so that the audience was not distracted by what was going on in the background.
It is also worth remembering that when you are talking to the media the audience will form an almost instant impression of you. Appearing before the cameras in a rugby shirt with a Bluetooth earpiece in his ear arguably did not convey the professional appearance Mr Reid was hoping to create.
Mr Reid is unlikely to ever face this level of media scrutiny again and this blog is not designed to be too critical of his performance. But this case shows any business, no matter what the nature of their work, can be hit by an unexpected public relations crisis.
And the risk of lasting reputational damage has never been greater with rolling news channels and the growth of social media.
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Click here to find out more about our highly practical crisis communications courses.
