Always Prepared: the Less-Than-10-Minutes Response Rule
By Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my bestseller “The Global PR Revolution.”
All these things have affected our industry so dramatically that PR experts must be excellently trained and prepared for all contingencies. Nowadays, 60–70 percent of our clients turn to us as PR consultants — and it seems to be the same everywhere in the world
— for two main reasons: crisis management and reputation management.
The two often overlap. Not always, though. Sometimes, an organization has no reputation but strives to become famous and established. Today, that is the easiest thing to do — you create your social media profiles, hire professionals, and they start writing about you or on your behalf and work on professionally engaging with the organization’s target audience. PR experts need to be brilliantly trained and prepared. That’s not just good sense — there are concrete and powerful reasons. First, a mere ten years ago, we used to have plenty of time on our hands to solve a crisis. Usually, we used to spend almost an entire day doing that. You’d get up in the morning, grab the newspaper, and see that someone had written something against your client.
You would call your client and say, “Well, here is a bad article about you.”
They would reply, “Come to my office so we can figure out how to handle it.”
Then, you would go and have lunch with the client. In the afternoon, you will issue a press release. At 5 or 6 p.m., you would meet with reporters to tell them that what had been written was not true, and so on. We used to have between ten and twelve hours to solve a crisis. Now we don’t even have ten minutes! When our client suffers a blow somewhere, we have to respond immediately. We do that daily in our office by monitoring social networks, even at 5 a.m. If any of our clients have been affected in any way, we’ve got to react. If the client has done wrong, we naturally apologize on their behalf. If the client has been wronged, we have to disprove whatever false allegations or perceptions there might be about them. This requires an entirely different mindset, training, and level of preparedness. It requires an understanding that PR and social media are no longer distinct. From the point of view of a top-notch PR expert, they have become the same thing. Many people come to our office and say,
“I don’t want social media. What I want from you is traditional PR!”
“What do you understand by traditional PR?” we ask.
“Well, more traditional, you know, classical PR!”
You can guess our response.
There is no such thing anymore; it’s all social media now!”
The findings of the 2018 World PR Report by the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) demonstrated that beyond any doubt, based on the survey of ICCO’s members. Roughly half of the respondents, 44 percent, said they saw the most growth in 2017 in social media community management. Multimedia content creation and senior counsel remained second and third, with 37 percent and 31 percent, respectively. According to the survey, social media community management scored the highest growth in almost all world regions — Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, the UK, and Western Europe. The only exception is North America, where multimedia content creation came in first, with social media management being a close second. This result probably reflects the market’s maturity and certain specifics.
The book is available on Amazon.com and BeharBooks.com.
