Day: May 2, 2003

Burson-Marsteller has launched a new service called PRePARE which is designed to help companies ensure their websites will cope effectively with any possible crisis. 

From their press release:

PRePARE “incorporates the agency’s earlier September 11th research based on a review of 88 Web sites from Fortune 500 companies and the 50 most-trafficked Web properties. The study revealed that 86% of Web sites had in one way or another responded to the national crisis within one week of the terrorist attacks.

More from B-M at their press room. More at PR Week.

Note: (I’d link to the press release itself but there’s no URL in the pop-up window from their website and I just couldn’t bother trying to discover it. A criteria for PRePARE 2.0 perhaps?)

For anyone involved in the technology business Jon Udell’s blog is essential reading.  Jon is a full blown card carrying journalist with Infoworld, who also happens to write a hugely popular weblog and is open to helping PR people understand how all these new technologies can be used for good 🙂

In case you haven’t read Jon’s earlier posts, he outlines how blogs intersect with PR here, and also covers Phil Gomes’ RSS and PR whitepaper here.

He has an interesting post on the new virtual press room that has been created by Phil Wainewright (another media blogger) over at Loosely Coupled’s site. It’s a good example of RSS in action.

Phil’s blog is at http://www.looselycoupled.com/blog/

For all our clever inventions and sophisticated thinking, we really do have some major weaknesses.  The human race is simply unable or unwilling to learn from the lessons of history.

We make the same mistakes again and again and again, even with the knowledge of what went before.

Reputation Management and crisis communication is a great example of this weakness.

Let’s be honest, there is no harder discipline in Public Relations than dealing with the aftermath of a crisis. 

And of course when it comes to crises hindsight is 20/20. Looking back at past crises you can see the errors being made and you ask yourself how they could get themselves into this situation.  Unfortunately it’s a little more difficult when you are in the heat of the battle.

Anyone who has the potential to be involved in a crisis, and that includes every single PR people on the planet, should become a student of past crises.  There are valuable lessons to be learnt by evaluating them, lessons that could help you through a future crisis.

 Pan Pharmaceuticals in Australia could have benefitted from evaluating how a crisis way back in 1982 was handled. Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol crisis was exemplary and even though we live in a very different world today the basics of good reputation management haven’t changed.

Based on reports from the Sydney Morning Herald, they could have done with the help.