Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Michael Terpin, Terpin Communications Group | Uncorporate Communications
EDITORS’ CHOICE

Crisis communications is one of the most important and highly visible areas in the entire PR profession. While a solid media visibility campaign can help put a new company on the map (or put a company that’s been declining or stalling out back on the right track), the lack of crisis communications skills can literally kill a company of any size.

Perhaps the most notable example of that would be the death of Arthur Andersen, a multi-billion-dollar iconic firm which voluntarily shut down after it was convicted of obstruction of justice in the Enron case and pilloried by the broadcast media. Ironically, the Supreme Court overturned those convictions less than three years later, but the damage was done and it was lethal. Other textbook examples of bungled crisis communications include the Tylenol scare, Union Carbide’s response to Bhopal and now FEMA’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, but all of these (other than Katrina) have been in the age that preceded blogging. This paper will examine the ways in which crisis communications has been changed by the existence of the blogosphere, as well as the ways that it has stayed the same.

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