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Disaster Management: When Not to Send a Press Release

A lot of my clients are doing a one-off piece of public relations because they need news done quickly. People generally come to to you with urgent press release needs when something has gone horribly awry; I do a fair bit of disaster management here at OvernightPR. I’m good at that kind of PR, and though it may sound like I’m shooting myself in the foot when I say this–given that I specialize in press releases written quickly–your best bet isn’t always to address your disaster with a press release.  Let’s look at when a press release is a good way to get the news out and manage your problem:

• Legal Issues
• Legal issues–especially investor-related legal issues–generally have specific requirements for what you can talk about, when you should discuss it, and how you need to distribute the news. If your lawyer advises you send a press release, don’t quibble.
• Corrections
• If you made a mistake in a previous public statement, it’s probably best to issue the correction in the same manner. No one likes eating ‘umble pie, but own up to the mistake and try to move on, and you’ll be better off than if you let the impression that you’re dishonest fester in your audience’s minds.
• Urgent news
• If your disaster is a real-life honest to goodness breaking news disaster of the “we need to recall our product before it kills someone” sort, alternative measures of PR may not be the solution you need. The wire services work hard to get your news out to journalists as quickly and accurately as they can, so you might as well make use of that skill set and stick by the traditional method.

Those are the three big areas of disaster where you definitely want to make sure that you’ve put a lot of thought into your decision before ruling out a press release as your method of communication. So when is it more appropriate to look at alternative measures?

• Community Management
• There are times when you’ve done nothing illegal and you don’t have immediately pressing lifesaving news. Maybe you’ve made a mistake less in the “we issued a factually incorrect statement” way and more in the “we screwed up” fashion. Press releases are a very impersonal tool to try and repair a relationship with your community. Look at a more direct means of communicating, then. One example I may talk about in a later post is using an open letter to repair community relations.
• Customer Service
• This is related to “Community Management”, but with a key difference. One of the nightmares that social media has brought to the average executive in a company is that social media means that if one of your customer-facing employees is having a bad day, you can quickly find yourself having a social media-driven PR nightmare. An example of this is the recent Ocean Marketing meltdown that more or less illustrated the perfect storm of “employee having a bad day” and “social media PR disaster” I’m talking about here. This wasn’t an example of a mistake made at the corporate decision-making level, and issuing a press release (which N-Control, the company represented by Ocean Marketing, did end up doing) isn’t going to fix the problem. When you’re trying to correct a customer-centered issue, take a customer-centered approach and talk to them in the same arena that they’re already in.
•  When Another Company is Involved
• Disaster management PR is tricky enough when one company is involved; when you have two or more, it gets even trickier. In that respect, whether you’re dealing with a public disappointment over an announced contract that fell through or you’re trying to put some spin on the fact that one of your big clients just elected to not renew a long-running contract with you, using channels other than press releases can help you maintain some control of the story without escalating the issue into a press release war. Those may be kind of fun to watch from the outside, but they look anything but professional.

At a macro level, it comes to this: public-facing disaster PR is frequently handled best via methods other than press releases. When you have other outside issues influencing your method of discussion, though, you would be ill-advised to ignore them.