Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I recently participated as the designated “social media expert” as part of a crisis communications case study session at the 2012 NIRI Southwest regional conference. This year’s conference was held in New Orleans and the session centered on a fictitious publicly held bead manufacturing company (apropos for the conference host city) that found itself suddenly facing a major environmental crisis. During the true-to-life exercise, attendees took on the roles of the company’s corporate communications officers and were tasked with implementing all aspects of the crisis response plan.

In their new roles, the attendees had to make a number of decisions relating to the immediate actions of the fictitious company, “Beignet Beads & Baubles.” For example, should the company proceed with a press conference with the governor announcing a state grant that afternoon? Should management go forward with a scheduled presentation at a major investor conference in New York the next day?

Should a planned announcement of a major plant expansion be delayed? As typically happens with a real crisis, the Beignet Beads & Baubles “crisis team-for-a-day” was given an increasing amount of information to complicate their decision-making process....

[An excellent tabletop crisis PR exercise worth reading ~ Jeff]

“To touch and improve lives” is the stated purpose of Procter & Gamble. One has to ask: Doesn’t every company want to improve the lives of its customers, employees, and other stakeholders? Would a company deliberately not want to improve lives?

...In an October interview with Fortune, P&G CEO and Chairman Bob McDonald discussed the financial pressures facing the company and outlined some of his initiatives to address these.

However, this interview raised more issues for me than it did answer or address them. There’s the problem of the multiple messages that employees hear each day. There’s the 40-20-10 plan asking employees to focus on 40 biggest categories/countries, 20 biggest innovations, and 10 emerging markets. Then there’s a message to focus on “discontinuous innovation,” in other words, radical or revolutionary innovation. So does that mean only discontinuous innovations will be accepted and funded in the next few years? What about other less radical innovations? Where do they fit? Should employees bother recommending anything less than discontinuous innovation?...

[Is your corporate message, mission or tag line muddled? ~ Jeff]

The Arthur W. Page Society today introduced “Building Belief: A New Model for Activating Corporate Character and Authentic Advocacy,” a corporate comms model that builds upon the organization’s 2007 “Authentic Enterprise” report. Back then, the group described the new comms landscape. This new model offers a framework for managing it....