On Words and Business

I attended a fascinating talk by Jeff Ansell, media consultant and the author of When the Headline Is You.

He had five tips for dealing with the media for companies in crisis. With apologies to Jeff for the rewording to take the focus away from the crisis situation these are designed for, these are great tips for communicating with your stakeholders at any time.

1. Be accessible.
2. Show them you care.
3. Pay attention to social media.
4. Know that fact will never win over emotion.
5. Commit to action.

This swine flu outbreak is an emerging story and all over the news. And certainly the total effect can’t be known yet. But let’s face it…we’re all much more at risk for the regular variety of flu. Yet rarely does anyone other than public health professionals get up in arms about it.

We humans are pretty bad at assessing true risk, since the more familiar we are with something (like the regular old flu) the less threatening it seems. And the more unusual the event (swine or avian for example), the riskier and scarier it seems, even if it isn’t truly more dangerous.

So as a news story (versus a personal or virological one) this is an interesting case. How can the media describe it and assign it the right amount of urgency, without tripping our fear response?

Any thoughts?

In Don’t Worry, Be Happy in a recent issue of Fortune magazine, Stanley Bing renounces the following types of bad influences, in re our economic situation :

• Executioners
• Rear admirals
• Insecurity analysts
• Economists
• Weasels

“My goal is to live through this situation and to worry as little as possible and be as happy as I can while doing so.”

A voice of reason.

Thank you Stanley Bing. Whoever you are.

If you’ve ever wondered how would make use of blogs during an emergency, you could do much worse than to follow the lead of the University of Missouri Rolla. In the initial phases of a bomb scare and subsequent arrest of a student, the university simply monitored the blogosphere, adding just one comment for clarification. Later, they used a university blog to help direct visitors to the official news site, where they would find the most up-to-date and accurate information.

Interesting example of how to deal with a crisis and quell rumors in these days of instant communications.

Visit this web marketing/PR blog for higher ed to learn a bit more about the story: Collegewebeditor.com