Getting The Story Straight On The Same Page — Avoiding The Need For Reactive PR

by Paul Grimsley

The easiest way to create a bad effect is to have someone on your team who is off-message. Someone is over in the corner doing their own thing, and offering up explanations for what is occurring that totally do not square with anything that anyone else is saying.

Your enemies don’t even have to come up with a message about how one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, because it is totally obvious that that is the case.

Then you have to come up with explanations for the erroneous explanations. You aren’t just having to handle the real problems, but self-created problems from not knowing what your own team are up to … this is sloppy public relations and personnel management.

The other issue which should really be handled, if you have professionals handling your public relations for you, is that they should have at least some notion of how your speech is going to play to a crowd. Have you crafted a speech that is going to win you accolades, or at least listeners, or are you going to be causing upset, or at worst genuine backlash because you have demonstrated yourself to be insensitive or just plain unaware of the subject upon which you are speaking?

In some situations it may be best to say nothing. In some situations saying nothing is not an option. Knowing which situation is which is key, before you even sit down to craft a statement.

If you have someone that continually goes off-book it can make the position of the person on the clean-up crew increasingly untenable. If there is absolutely no way to control the person that you are supposed to be wrangling, you either need to know that you are going to be on a constant cycle of handling problems, or you should walk away from the job. Some people want to create a carefully crafted image that conveys a certain message, and others are happier to have a kind of rough and ready and un-managed presence, because that is how they generated interest, and that is how they are maintaining interest. The person making the wild statements is going to look bad because of the statements — the person on clean-up is going to look bad for trying to perform logistical acrobatics to make something more palatable which falls into the category of unpolishable turd, or bad because they clean something up, it gets retconned, and then they have to come up with a new way to sweep it under the rug.

The other thing that really needs to be avoided if possible, is the do-over (and under this one comes the need to explain and unpack the meaning of a previous statement). If you are always having to explain what you said the first time, then you aren’t putting good messages out there, and you need to have a re-think … possibly coordinate better the first time around. If you do manage to get the worms back in the can, in no circumstances is it a good idea to return to your first statement — this is going to turn the whole process into a hamster wheel you won’t ever get off.

So, tell the truth. Have the whole team in agreement. Get it right the first time. If you do have to clarify some points and then get the point across at least, do not, upon being accused of flip-flopping, re-assert the problematic statement you were trying to handle. These things are simple to think with, obviously harder to put into practice, but they are life-savers when it comes to creating good PR.