IABC Café

The need to prepare to communicate in a crisis was brought to my attention three times within the past 24 hours, so I’m paying attention.

It started when I registered yesterday for a pre-conference workshop to be delivered by Gerard Braud at the 2007 IABC International Conference in New Orleans. Braud’s workshop topic, “Katrina: Lessons in leadership and communication,” will provide a real-life example of crisis communications in action.

I’ve never worked with Gerard, but our paths did cross immediately following Hurricane Katrina, and it started on this blog. Past Chair Warren Bickford–who escaped from New Orleans as the hurricane was striking– had written a post looking to spur interest in chapters assisting in hurricane relief efforts. Braud’s reply to that post was both moving and alarming. In part, he wrote:

The problem is, there is no way to get information to anyone in an official capacity who can get me in to help. I need an official police or emergency vehicle to get from Destin, Florida to Covington, Louisiana. Only official vehicles are allowed on the interstate.

As with most disasters, everyone is busy handling the crisis and no one is communicating. I have a broadcast camera and computer editing in my car. If I can get in, I can drive back out to places with power to get this information out to citizens who need it. ONE MILLION people are trying to get official information and there is NO SOURCE FOR IT. One Million people will be HOMELESS for week and don’t know it yet. I have the tools and the know how. I just need a way in.

I contacted Braud later that day and posted more information on my former Blogger site. I’m looking forward to meeting Braud in person this June and discussing lessons to learn–and to avoid.

The second item about crisis communication was in the Friday, April 6, 2007 New York Times. The article, “An S O S for 911 Systems in Age of High-Tech,” (registration required) is an eye-opening update on how the 9-1-1 emergency number used in the United States has become very ineffective in this age of cell-phones and Internet telephony. According to a source quoted in the Times article, “40 percent of the nation’s counties, most of them rural or small-town communities like this one, cannot yet pinpoint the location of cellphone callers, though the technology to do so has been available for at least five years.”

The third item is information about the First European Security and Safety Summit that will be held on June 6-7, 2007 in Brussels Heysel, Belgium. The European Emergency Number Association is planning to offer sessions at the summit that will be dedicated to all aspects of emergency telecommunications (112, interoparability and alert systems issues).

We U.S. citizens haven’t had to face the technical and political challenges that come from being one of several adjacent nations, each with its own emergency number to dial. The 112 initiative seeks to popularize that number as the single emergency number for the European Union nations. Of course, they also must tackle the questions of how to trace calls made by non-landline phones.

When an accident or disaster occurs, communications between emergency services, authorities and citizens are needed the most, while availability can be limited–or nonexistent. Consider brushing up on this topic so that you can help your clients or company executives to communicate at those times.

I and a paid professional spent the better part of last weekend renovating my home’s laundry room. The “spin, wash, rinse” metaphor of my headline was inspired by that experience and time spent today listening to public relations advocates and experts discuss the current state and future of the profession.

Best Practices in Corporate Communications (BPCC), a member-based service and benchmarking resource for more than 50 Fortune 500-level member companies, organized a teleconference titled, “Next Practices—The Direction and Future of Corporate Communications.” Although BPCC and its three guest speakers focused on PR communications, I was able to glean some valuable thoughts to use in my internal communications position.

The speakers were:

• Matt Shaw, Vice President at the Council of Public Relations Firms

• Jennifer McClure, President & Executive Director at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR)

• Michael G. Cherenson, APR, Executive Vice President, Success Communications Group TBA & Chairman of the Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) National Advocacy Advisory Board

PR remains under scrutiny (or attack), even as practitioners in certain segments, such as PR agencies, continue to enjoy revenue growth. Shaw said PR agencies last year enjoyed the fourth consecutive year of growth, averaging 14%. “Optimism reigns,” he said during the audio conference. “We’re looking for another good year in 2007; we expect to average 11% growth” over the next few years. That growth is coming from “the technology space, consumer products, and health care,” Shaw said. The greatest percentage of PR agency work continues to be marketing/communications (54% of total revenue), corporate communications (24% of revenue); public affairs (12%) and financial-related (6%).

While that puts a nice spin on the state of PR’s health, it doesn’t tell the whole story. McClure said the profession needs to wash itself of some outdated notions that hold it back. “The official source for information in an organization (PR) is not the most trusted source of info,” she said. “That’s a problem.”

PR practitioners have to be more than a “keeper of messages” or even an organization’s “mouthpiece,” she said. Social media including blogs have created a “plethora of people who can comment on a message and state their opinions. Our messages are getting lost. We can be the ears (listen) for our organization, not just be the mouthpiece” by engaging in the conversations, she added.

“Listen to the bloggers and respond appropriately,” McClure said. “We have the responsibility to listen to blog issues and then go to our management, get their response, and then go back to the public and say what we will do.” Lower-level staff are becoming unofficial company spokespersons because they have the technical expertise that bloggers and others using social media tools want to tap, McClure said. “You need to enable them (e.g., company engineers and developers) to use the tools to be good communicators. We’ve thought of ourselves too long as being Press Relations, not Public Relations.”

What else can PR professionals do to improve the profession’s image? Cherenson suggests rinsing off some of the tactics that have been gathering dust, such as relationship-building with publics. “We found through a PRSSA conference that students were hearing journalism instructors bash PR,” Cherenson said. “We need to educate them; it won’t happen overnight.” He also pointed out that PRSA and the IABC are excellent sources of tools, tips and advice for fledgling communicators who need direction and support.

All-in-all, it was nice to hear PR professionals doing more than airing the dirty laundry.

The headline could have read, “IABC Scooped by Shel Holtz.”

IABC is taking steps to advance its advocacy initiative.

Here is a link to the new IABC Advocacy Commons.

Here is the original post by Shel that alerted me.

I was one of several IABC/Chicago chapter members who were contacted about two weeks ago by one of our own regarding this initiative. I knew that IABC was planning to discuss it at the recent Leadership Institute in San Diego, but didn’t know about the Advocacy Commons until I read Shel’s post.