Take any PR disaster. Do an autopsy on it. Nine times out of 10 you'll find, somewhere in the wreckage, the original PR plan. Clear. Logical. Rational.
The problem is that when the heat of battle begins to rise, the plan is abandoned as a number of deadly patterns surface. I call them the Crisis Dirty Dozen. They manifest themselves in large and small organisations, State-sponsored bodies and commercial firms, non-profit entities and academic institutions.
In truly bad PR disasters, all of the 12 appear simultaneously. Even one of them, however, can vitiate everything the original PR plan set out to achieve.
1. Anger The first thing an angry person does is lose sight of the key audience he or she must reach. The PR plan, if it's any good, will have identified the primary audience, established how the campaign should change that audience's attitude and precisely what information or evidence will reach and alter their thinking. Angry, a speaker forgets all that.
The fight takes over and the focus is on the opponent. It becomes more imperative to get dug out of the other panellist, or bring Richard Crowley to his knees on Morning Ireland than to reach, inform or influence anybody else. The angry interviewee sets out to convince, contradict or prove the interviewer wrong. In the process, they put the journalist centre stage at the expense of their own data. Journalists are pretty good at putting themselves centre stage without help.
2. Organisations shatter along pre-existing fault lines Under the intense heat of media pressure, only the most integrated and mutually trusting organisations stay united. In many cases, the thin membrane holding competing factions together falls away and internal conflict surfaces. Good reporters smell this the way a dog smells fear, begin to write about it or comment on it, and every published or broadcast word widens the rift. Oddly, this tends to be worse in non-profit organisations than in commercial entities. In a commercial firm, if the head of one division was to publicly brief journalists in a way that contradicts what management has said, a firing is on the cards. In a voluntary organisation, that kind of punitive action isn't an option.
3. Leaks break out Half the time the leakers aren't even whistle-blowers with an agenda. They're innocents who get an adrenalin rush from covertly informing a journalist. They don't believe they're doing any harm. The people at the top of the organisation, on the other hand, begin to dread each morning's papers, because of the latest unauthorised spewing, and instead of running the show, begin to spend their time on leak-catcher plans.
Like someone trying to identify a petty thief by stretching a hair across the door of the safe, they begin to consider giving the suspected leaker a marginally altered copy of a document, so that when a particular misprint appears in the newspaper, drawn from the doctored document, they'll be in a "Gotcha" situation. 4. Argumentum ad hominem starts On media, instead of attacking the issue, speakers start to attack people. By name. In person. The audience is appalled, and the person attacked usually gains.
5. The little learning syndrome breaks out In public communication, a little learning is a truly dangerous thing. Suddenly, every amateur is in the spin business. Every press release and statement is parsed by dozens. At this point, good external PR consultants ditch the contract, because their expertise is no longer being used, and they can't risk their name appearing on the chaotic end result.
6. Mistakes get made - and magnified Without pressure, an organisation making a mistake pauses. They analyse the damage done by the mistake and - if they need to - make a coherent and graceful apology. They then work out why the mistake was made and what must be done to prevent repetition. The same organisation, in the heat of a troubled campaign, flails around making the mistake infinitely worse, trading blame and setting themselves up for the next one.
7. The "shoulds" break out Punishment and reproach become the priorities. Memos fly. People start consulting lawyers. (It doesn't help, of course, that at this point in public crises every commentator in print and on the airwaves is also with the "shoulds" and there's nothing quite so infuriating as being told by a stranger what you should have done when the stranger hasn't been a part of the hassle that prevented you doing what you know very well you should have done.)
8. Decisions and policy are abandoned The rationale which made such sense in the calm pre-action days is forgotten. Strategy no longer applies. It's all tactics and response, and the responses increasingly become little more than reflex kicks.
9. Conspiracy theories develop This point in the collapse of a PR campaign marks the onset of a phase which often leaves long-term internal damage. Within the organisation, people begin to explain bad coverage by reference to the fact that so-and-so is known to be a distant cousin of the offending journalist. Or that a particular broadcaster's political affiliations are an open secret. Conspiracy theory-peddling takes up time and taints every encounter with media, so the organisation looks furtive, hostile, defensive and paranoid. Which, at this point, is often the truth.
10. People go onto media unprepared At a time when preparation is much more important, because public attention is riveted, the lure of the open mike brings speakers onto radio programmes without any objective other than getting it off their chest. Enmeshed in the details of their grievance, they fail to distinguish wood from trees. It makes for highly entertaining radio as listeners play "who's the weakest link".
11. The urge to correct commentators takes over A columnist in, say, The Irish Times, rubbishes the organisation's case. Instead of working out how to reach and influence the readers who may have been influenced by what the columnist wrote, the organisation tries to set up a meeting with the columnist to prove to them the error of their ways. I'm sure it's possible to reach and radically convert an Irish Times columnist from a deeply-held position, but I can't, offhand, remember many occasions where such a columnist appeared in print the following week saying: "Lads, I got it all wrong, let me tell you what a fool I was."
12. All messengers get blamed There's a broad-spectrum fairness to this. The outside messengers (reporters, TV interviewers) get large swatches of the blame. But internal messengers (information officers, designated spokespeople, heads of PR) get blamed too: never mind the reality, there's something wrong with the spin.
Any industrial action these days puts the organisation involved under huge pressure, once media gets in on the act, and the Crisis Dirty Dozen are almost certain to emerge.
Realistic planning based on their inevitability would prevent a great deal of counter-productive organisational misery.
On the other hand, the public attention span and the public memory are shortening all the time.
So recovery from PR disaster is nearly always possible.
Terry Prone is managing director of Carr Communications
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)