Speaker 1: Should you issue a press release as part of your crisis communications strategy? Hey everybody, Melissa Agnes here, and I'm here with this week's episode of the Crisis Ready video series, where I aim to help you implement a crisis ready culture, one tip, strategy, or case study at a time. So I actually still get asked this question often in my consultancy work with clients. And actually, yesterday I was watching as PCA had an explosion at one of their mills, and three people were reported to have lost their lives in the explosion. And hours later, so the explosion happened, everything picked up on social media, the media was reporting about the incident, and then hours later, a spokesperson for the organization came out and finally gave some kind of communication, some kind of response and said, we're gathering facts and we'll be issuing a press release soon. Though press releases are still being thought of as a means of communication during a crisis, and they shouldn't be. The press release, in terms of crisis response, is dead people. Let's look at why. First of all, traditionally, the goal and the objective of a press release was to create a very stiff, corporate, brief message, communication in the third person, and to push it out onto the wires, to hopefully be picked up by the media, and to feed the media, the organization's communications and message points of an incident, regarding an incident. Today, few points, one, it's not just the media that we want to be speaking with, or that we need to be speaking with, or that's migrating online to go see the response of an organization in crisis. Two, we don't need to push things out through the wire anymore when we can leverage our own digital real estate and own the content that we publish, the responses to a crisis. And three, they can be, by leveraging our own real estate, they don't have to be brief, they don't have to be stiff communications, they don't have to be in the third person, they can actually be sincere, and personable, and a way to connect and really speak to and with those who matter most to your business, which again, is not just the media. And not to mention, I mean, I watched another crisis unfold a couple weeks ago, and the organization's, oddly, it was another mill that had an explosion, and the media, their first response was to issue a press release, again, stiff, simple, very short, third person, no information, no real details, written really by their lawyers, you know, it had that legal jargon, and then, a few days later, once they realized that the noise was ensuing on social media and was relentless, and that people wanted more information and expected more information, they finally leveraged their digital platform, so their corporate website and social media, to actually begin to communicate a little bit more effectively and thoroughly, and compassionately, not so much, with their stakeholders. So if you're going to do it anyways, because you realize that the press release doesn't cut it, think about this now, pre-crisis, cut the press release strategy out, and go straight to the strategies that work, and that your stakeholders expect of you. So in terms of crisis response, the press release is dead, it is not the right response tool or means of communication to leverage anymore, it just gets in the way of things, and hinders your effective or successful crisis management. So instead, leverage your digital real estate, figure out where your stakeholders expect to hear from you, where they're migrating intuitively, instinctively, and meet them on those platforms, and of course, whether one of those platforms is or isn't your website, you still want to make sure that your crisis communications are on your website somewhere, on digital real estate that you own, so that it goes down in search engine history, and so that you can be more thorough, you can publish those FAQs, you can respond to questions that are forming on social media in masses, and you know, feed people back to your website for your messages, for your sincere, you know, transparent crisis communications. What do you think? What's the strategy that you use? What struggles are you having, experiencing internally when it comes to that old mindset of we gotta issue a press release in a crisis? What struggles are you having to shift that mindset into a more effective means of crisis communication? I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below this video, or let's take to Twitter using the hashtag Crisis Ready to continue the conversation.