by Chris Nerney | Jul 24, 2024 | Blog
My colleague Philip Anast recently shared some advice from the Wall Street Journal via the Advisory Board regarding situations “where it’s better to slow down at work.”
Let’s be honest: In the hyper-paced world of healthcare public relations and marketing, where there’s a product rollout, speaker submission, or awards deadline around every corner, the notion of “slowing down at work” is downright antithetical. When you’re managing multiple accounts – and trying to make each feel as if they are your highest priority – you instinctively fear that slowing things down will derail your strategic timelines, frustrate your clients, and send your blood pressure soaring. Why make an already intense job even more stressful?
The answer is there are times in PR and marketing where slowing down is essential to doing the best job for your clients, your agency, and your sanity. Here are three situations when slowing down pays off in PR and marketing. These apply to in-house marketing/PR pros, who face pressures similar to those of agency workers.
When you’re the final set of eyes
Marketing and PR pros must create and process high-level, detailed content every day. Thought-leadership bylines, case studies, white papers, press releases, sales sheets, analyst pitches – it never ends. If your client is a life sciences company, you may be writing about concepts that may be ever-so-slightly outside your wheelhouse. That’s OK – you probably didn’t go to medical school, and your yearslong devotion to Grey’s Anatomy will only get you so far.
Still, when you’re delivering content assets, it’s important to get everything right. And no matter how many people look at the “final” draft of a byline, press release, or other public-facing deliverable, someone will be the last set of eyes before the news release is sent to Cision or the byline to your client’s CEO.
Even if it’s the 10th time you’ve read it, do so with intense focus just one more time. Read slowly, scan for typos, and pay attention to flow and impact. This is your last chance! Put another way, if there’s something wrong that you didn’t catch, you may be catching flak from the client, who is paying the agency good money to not mess up content.
When your client wants to do something impulsive and perhaps ill-advised
Clients can be quite emotional. Which is understandable. They’re under pressure on multiple fronts from competitors and investors. They are responsible for executing on product, market, and growth strategies. They’re probably working 70 hours a week. Plus their chief marketing officer just abandoned the company for a new job. And their kids have the flu.
Nonetheless, when the client’s CEO decides what the company needs to do is issue a press release every day for a week before HLTH to carpet-bomb the market into recognizing the pioneering brilliance of their platform (something I heard an investor for a startup insist on), you must slow their roll. Politely but firmly explain how a press release a day doesn’t really align with the rhythm of how the healthcare tech media operates – “Company X made a big splash today. I can’t wait to see what they’ve cooked up for tomorrow!” said no tech reporter, ever – and that it also would be a waste of money. (The money message eventually got through to the investor.)
Similarly, if a CEO wants to confront that editor from Healthcare IT News who omitted the company from a roundup of startups to watch in Sector Z in the coming year and clearly harbors a grudge against us, you must counsel restraint. Emphasize the importance of cultivating long-term relationships with the media, analysts, and others in the industry ecosystem who could help the company down the road. Just giving your excitable clients some time to vent often is enough to defuse a mini-crisis.
When there’s a full-blown PR crisis
Sometimes an actual crisis will arise – your client’s product is the subject of a recall or warning, a customer files a major lawsuit, an investigative article in the mainstream media that mentions the company in a negative light blows up on social media, etc. You’ve got to move fast or things will quickly spin out of control!
Making a public statement that can be easily contradicted, however, will only worsen the problem. Thus, it is imperative that you know the facts. Make sure you take the time to gather all the facts surrounding the issue and are interpreting them correctly. You only have one chance to respond the first time to a crisis. Make it count.
Conclusion
In the PR and marketing biz, you need to think fast and move fast. Sometimes, though, slower is better.
by Philip Anast | Jun 23, 2021 | Blog
A recent cyberattack on a fuel pipeline has hospital and health system officials rethinking what they need to do better to protect their own networks from breaches and the huge consequences that can result.
For communications professionals at such institutions, rehearsing such crisis scenarios and what should follow can be the difference between saving a reputation or seeing it destroyed.
The ability to respond promptly to disasters or damaging reports can build confidence in constituents that the organization is on top of the crisis and is a leader in its sector.
One thing to consider is that crisis plans should make very clear who is responsible for what. Here are some suggestions to keep in mind:
Prepare in advance with inputs from the organization’s functional areas. The time to plan for a crisis is long before it hits. A well- thought-out crisis plan is designed to help an organization communicate internally and externally with clear, succinct, and timely direction.
The goal is to minimize confusion and maintain confidence amidst whatever crisis may occur. Opinions vary and emotions are strong when the stakes are high, the book Crucial Conversations tells us. The time for addressing conflicting perspectives is in the preparation phase of a crisis plan, not during the crisis itself. While there will undoubtedly be differences of opinion in one’s approach depending on the circumstances, a detailed plan rehearsed with key players and influencers can minimize disruption when things get tense. Still, even if things get heated, the book’s authors tell us to leverage the power of dialogue with absolute candor and deep respect for others’ viewpoints to realize the desired goals.
Identify stakeholders. Designing an effective crisis management plan also requires an understanding of stakeholders and their roles. Stakeholders are all those who have an interest in the outcome. For a health system, the list is generally long and can include patients, governments, administrators, board members, and clinicians. Each might need slightly different things during a crisis, which is why each stakeholder should be considered a separate audience.
Identify a communications chain of command. Crisis plans should – in advance – identify all of those who will be involved with managing a crisis, what areas they are responsible for and who is ultimately responsible for making decisions. Then, all of those involved should receive the training they need to be effective in their roles. For example, specialists from all functional areas of the organization should be available to lend their expertise should the need arise, and executive spokespeople should receive media training.
Create real-world tools that can be modified later. One of the most valuable things to have in a crisis is a head start. Messaging, scripts, and spokespeople should be prepared in advance. The communications team or the company’s PR firm can later assist in adapting standard scripts to specific situations based on the event and fallout.
Ensure that crisis management messaging addresses various aspects of the crisis. When communicating bad news or another type of crisis, it is imperative that the organization’s spokespersons do the following:
Elaborate with the “what” – explain what happened with concise language, together with the organization’s position on the issue
Educate with the “how” – explain how audiences should respond to the situation and how the organization is responding
Engage with the “why” – explain the impact the situation has on operations so that impacts are not blown out of proportion
By giving thoughtful consideration to the development of a crisis management plan, organizations are more likely to be able to recover from bad news. In some cases, they might even exit the crisis with stronger brand relationships.
by admin | Feb 5, 2020 | Blog
You wake up and reach for your phone. Despite the many times you’ve heard it’s not healthy to check your email before your feet even hit the floor in the morning you immediately check your email.
This time, at the top of your inbox, is a message from your biggest client. It came through just after 6 a.m. At the top of the message is the first indication that your day is going to be interesting that good ol’ red “Urgent” exclamation mark.
The subject line reads “CALL ME ASAP.” You accept the fact that starting the coffee machine will have to wait awhile.
If you have been in PR for much time at all, some version of the above scenario has happened to you. The crisis could be any number of things.
In the healthcare industry, it could be a data breach that compromised thousands of electronic health records; a lawsuit; a massive bill from insurance; a disgruntled former employee spreading rumors on social media; or an important piece of medical equipment malfunctioning.
For nearly all enterprise organizations, and a good number of small to midsized business, a good PR firm is the first place they turn in the middle of a crisis. If you have done your job well as an agency, and earned the trust of your client, you are their emergency room in these situations. So you better have your scrubs on and your scalpel ready at all times.
When it comes to crisis communications, nothing is more important than having a solid predetermined plan in place. Before any sort of fire drill ever hits and the alarm starts blaring, the agency and the client should have had several proactive discussions during which they identified scenarios that might damage the brand or cast the company in a negative light. From there, messaging needs to be developed for each of those situations.
Of course, no one can anticipate every possible crisis. But if the most likely ones have been targeted, you can take your base messaging and create draft responses that are ready should one of those scenarios occur.
It likely won’t be the exact situation you planned for, but it will be close enough that you will only need to make tweaks and edits rather than developing your message from scratch in an already stressful situation. Better to hash out these responses over coffee and donuts when everyone is in a good mood, rather than at six in the morning when you haven’t even had the chance to brush your teeth, let alone get some caffeine into your bloodstream.
Once you have the messaging, you have a huge chunk of your prep work done. But it needs to be part of a larger plan that also includes:
A team leader from both the company and the agency
These two will be the main points of contact to keep leadership in the loop and field incoming calls from media to coordinate responses and/or interviews.
A spokesperson
It depends on the severity and level of attention the crisis has caused, but this should almost always be a C-level decision-maker whose name and voice carries the appropriate weight. This is the person who will give interviews and to whose name the statement will be attributed.
Internal communications
It is incredibly important that someone is assigned to internal communication to keep employees posted on the steps being taken during a crisis. There might be information that isn’t appropriate for you to share company-wide, but you need to share at least some details.
If not, staff will begin talking among themselves, to their families, and maybe even posting on social media. They can’t be in the dark.
On top of that, reporters might take some shots in the dark and start randomly reaching out to anyone who works for the company. If your staff hasn’t been told the plan, including that they should forward any media on to the company’s comms team, the problem can spin out of control fast. And once that happens, it’s nearly impossible to course-correct.
It might not be fun to imagine worst-case scenarios. It might even raise your heart rate. But once you do it, and your teams has a nice, neat folder saved on a shared drive somewhere with all the documents and procedures necessary for an organized response to an emergency, you will rest much easier.
You might even be able to pour a cup of coffee before you spend the rest of the day firing off emails and fielding phone calls.
by Brandon Glenn | Aug 8, 2018 | Blog
In most cities, a sports star leaving to join another team wouldn’t quite reach the level of crisis. No doubt, the world has countless far more serious and urgent problems.
But Cleveland’s a little different than most cities. Egos are a bit more fragile here after decades of job loss, population decline, environmental damage, and not to mention sports ineptitude or so it seems to this (humble) outsider who first moved to Cleveland about a decade ago.
So after the Cleveland Cavaliers drubbing yet again at the hands of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals in June, coupled with LeBron James impending free agency, thing were looking pretty bad for Cleveland. Despite hailing from nearby Akron and enjoying close ties with the local community, LeBron looked likely to depart Cleveland for a sexier, more glamourous destination, leaving the locals he left in his wake feeling abandoned and forgotten.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. But to LeBron’s credit, he learned from a past mistake, and let Cleveland fans down a little easier this time, while simultaneously providing a lesson on crisis communications.
We’ve seen this movie before
The date of “The Decision” by James – July 8, 2010 is one that lives in Cleveland sports infamy. On that night, the then-25-year-old who is perhaps the greatest sports star the city has ever known crushed his hometown fans by announcing on live TV his intention to “take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.” Next came the reaction. A city mourned, jerseys were burned, insults were hurled, and one melodramatic fan called it “the worst day of my life.”
Later that night, Cavaliers Owner Dan Gilbert hastily published a scathing open letter notoriously printed in comic sans font excoriating James for a “several-day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special.” Illustrating that Gilbert’s PR team had ready access to a thesaurus, the irate owner peppered his letter with several enjoyable descriptions of James and his decision, including “cowardly betrayal,” “shameful display of selfishness,” “shocking act of disloyalty,” and “heartless and callous action.”
To be clear, the majority of Cleveland fans weren’t angry at James for signing with Miami; they were upset by the “needless pain” he inflicted on the city for the spectacle of “The Decision,” which I recall one commentator comparing to a newly minted millionaire going on national tv to tell his high-school sweetheart he’s dumping her to move in with a supermodel.
Indeed, players change teams all the time (LeBron has now done it three times) “but no player has ever done it with the pomp, phoniness, pseudo-humility, and rehearsed innocence” as James, as a Chicago Sun-Times columnist correctly observed. That’s what understandably perturbed Cleveland fans, and later provided James with an opportunity to show growth in his style of public communication.
A second chance
After James spent four seasons in Miami and won two championships while making the NBA Finals every year, in 2014 he did what was once unthinkable. He mended fences (kind of) with Gilbert, rejoined the Cavs and led the city to its first major professional sports championship since 1964.
Then James broke Cleveland’s heart all over again. On July 1, 2018, the now-33-year-old James announced he was leaving the Cavaliers once more, having signed with the Los Angeles Lakers.
But this time it was different no self-serving, nationally televised special; no week-long buildup of drama and, thankfully, no jersey burnings or lamentations about the worst day of fans lives. James and his advisors simply delivered the news in 36-word press release:
LeBron James, four time NBA MVP, three time NBA finals MVP, fourteen time NBA All Star, and two time Olympic gold medalist has agreed to a four year, $154 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers.
While unnecessarily trumpeting his major accomplishments on the court isn’t the height of modesty, James deserves credit for learning from his mistakes and rolling out his latest “decision” in a far more muted, low-key fashion.
And that brings us to what we can learn from James in crisis communications: Be brief, take responsibility, get to the point and don’t sugarcoat things.
While this is a lesson that apparently took James eight years to learn, healthcare organizations can learn from his mistakes by never committing them in the first place.
And it’s probably best to avoid ever proclaiming that you’re taking your talents anywhere.
by Philip Anast | Jan 17, 2018 | Blog
A week doesn’t go by without news of a hospital or health system affected by a cyberattack or some other crisis. Coupled with an always-on news cycle and social media ecosystem, a crisis can destroy reputations. While the incidents themselves aren’t always preventable, organizations that thoughtfully do some advance crisis planning can emerge with their brands intact.
The ability to respond promptly to disasters or damaging reports can build confidence in constituents that the organization is on top of the crisis and a leader in its sector.
One thing to consider is that crisis plans should make very clear who is responsible for what. Here are several recommendations for consideration to help your organization keep pace:
- Prepare in advance with inputs from the organization’s functional areas. The time to plan for a crisis is long before it hits. A well thought-out crisis plan is designed to help an organization communicate internally and externally with clear, succinct and timely direction. The goal is to minimize confusion and maintain confidence whatever crisis may occur.
- Identify stakeholders. Designing an effective crisis management plan also requires an understanding of stakeholders and their roles. Stakeholders are all those who have an interest in the outcome. For a health system, the list is generally long and can include patients, governments, administrators, board members, clinicians. Each might need slightly different things during a crisis, and they should all be considered as separate audiences.
- Identify a communications chain of command. Crisis plans should in advance identify all of those who will be involved with managing a crisis, what areas they are responsible for and who is ultimately responsible for making decisions. Then, all of those involved should receive the training they need to be effective in their roles. For example, specialists from all functional areas of the organization should be available to lend their expertise should the need arise, and executive spokespeople should receive media training.
- Create real-world tools that can be modified later. One of the most valuable things to have in a crisis is a head start. Messaging, scripts and spokespeople should be prepared in advance. The communications team can later assist in adapting standard scripts to specific situations the organization encounters.
- Ensure that crisis management messaging addresses various aspects of the crisis. When communicating bad news or another type of crisis, it is imperative that the organization’s spokespersons do the following:
-
- Elaborate with the “what” explain what happened with concise language, together with the organization’s position on the issue
- Educate with the “how” explain how audiences should respond to the situation and how the organization is responding
- Engage with the “why” explain the impact the situation has on operations so that impacts are not blown out of proportion
By giving thoughtful consideration to the development of a crisis management plan, organizations are more likely to be able to recover from bad news. In some cases, they might even exit the crisis with stronger brand relationships.
