Streamlining Communication Roles for Effective Crisis Management (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Now, the traditional roles of communication teams are this. So, first of all, and this is what you would see the classic corporate communications public relations entities doing within your organization and company. They're acting as the communication advisors for both tactical and strategic teams. So, your incident management team, the tactical team, your executives in an executive crisis management team. They're assisting them in being able to develop communication and strategy about how to respond. They're also preparing, for the most part, most internal and external communications, hoping for consistency. They might be updating your website, that could be your internal and external websites. Monitoring the media, including the internet and social media, that is a huge topic all by itself and how do you do that? Doing media interviews and briefings and keeping the media informed of what you're doing. Preparing executives who might be on camera doing interviews so that they are presenting the image that you want your company to have. But they're also gathering all of the information from all the sources and they also have to validate that and verify it to make sure that it's correct. And then what they want to do is they need to also analyze that information and prioritize it for release in this particular incident. There's a certain amount of rumor control that they might need to be doing so that you can make sure that indeed you're keeping your finger on the pulse of what's happening. They might also be setting up investigations briefing, talking to the people on the street about what's happening to your company. How are they managing it? Again remember, we're trying to manage our reputation. They might also then set up and run the traditional media center for a large organization who's having a significant issue. Those are all of our usual communication roles. But I would actually even boil those down a little bit more as I talk. The key thing I'd like you to think about is first of all, who's in charge of all of these communications activities, especially if you engage other departments like IT, key lines of business, human resources, and so on? It may be somebody out of communications, but not necessarily. That's the first question and the first sometimes stumbling block in how you organize what's called a JIC. The next thing is about authority. I'm going to talk a lot about this later, but this is really who approves messaging. This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that we see in most of our clients. But then there's three other very distinct roles and responsibilities that are encapsulating a lot of what I just spoke about. That really is these three, gathering and verifying information, developing and coordinating information, and then distributing that information and evaluating its effectiveness. Now what I would say to you is if you still remain having all of your communicators spread throughout your organization, I would say to you that each one of them is doing all of this. When you stop and think about it, it's really ineffective because if HR is doing that and IT is doing that and the key lines of business are doing that, and by the way all of the communicators are doing that, we've wasted a lot of time and we still don't necessarily have a consistent message. So what I want to do is I'd like to talk about these three roles and think about your own communication process in your company or organization and ask the question, how are we doing this? How are we doing these three things in order to be accurate, timely, effective in our communication response?