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Lee:
Welcome to the Event Engine podcast. My name is Lee Matthew Jackson, and today we are joined with not one but two legends we have here, Jill and Paul. Folks, how are you doing?
Jill:
Hello. How are you doing? Good, thanks.
Lee:
Good, good, good. Well, for the folks who don’t know either of you. Let’s start with Jill. Could you give us a quick introduction of yourself, and then we’ll move on to Paul?
Jill:
Hi. Thanks, Lee. Thanks for having me. I’m Jill Hawkins. I run a business called Aniseed PR, working in the events industry. Worked in the industry for about 25 years now, working with all sorts of industry suppliers, from events, from registration companies to venues, that thing. I’ve been working with Paul for the last few years, I guess.
Lee:
Paul?
Paul:
Yeah. Hi, my name is Paul Richardson. I run a PR agency called Vividink. We’re 20 years old this year, and we spent the majority of that time working in and around events. I came to this in to doing this on an agency basis from client side. So I had 12, 15 years of running comms departments in large industrial companies before coming to do this. And this is far more fun.
Lee:
Excellent. Well, you just aged yourself a little bit there. I’m trying to do the math, but I would put you at approximately 45. Thank you. You’re all. Just a little bit older than me. So I was saying to Jill just before in this conversation that I’m like the chief of flapping. I panic very, very easily. And today, I believe we’re going to talk about crisis management. And I think what we should probably do, given as I am the chief of flap, I’ll freak out at the most minute issue, what actually constitutes a crisis?
Paul:
Right. Anyone can answer that. That’s a really good question because depending on the type of organisation you are, what you do, a crisis can be one of many things. Normally, you’d group them into five areas. So it could be a personnel related crisis. So it might be redundancies. It might be disgruntled employees doing whistleblowing. It could be some misconduct. It could be a death. It’s a personnel as a human element of a crisis. Organisational. So your organisation has done something wrong. You’re in legal problems. It could be an industrial accident, a spillage, a fire, something that affects the organisation itself. Technological, which is the one that’s obviously crept upon us and become very prevalent now. Data breach, data loss, theft of data, outages, those things that rely on technology to operate. There are natural crises which tend to be fall into the act of God category. Snowstorms, blizzards, hurricanes, floods, things that are well outside our control. That can have a significant impact on the ability to operate. And finally, financial crises, and whether that’s a bankruptcy or cash flow or misappropriation. And all of these can either be within your organisation or an impact from an external crisis of somebody else’s organisation.
Paul:
So it’s not just things that could go wrong with you. It’s things that the outside world could also spring upon you as a surprise. I’m sure there’s going to be a couple of some people saying, Yeah, but you didn’t cover mine. As I say, it’s a melting pot, and understanding where your own crises can arise is a really important part of the process.
Lee:
I think what I’m hearing then is that although I tease myself for flapping. Actually, everything in theory that I am worried about, these things that I am worried about, be it personnel, et cetera, I think, Oh, this isn’t really a crisis. This is something small. But to me it is because I still need to deliver a great product to our clients. I still to meet certain deadlines, et cetera. I still want to manage perceptions for the people that we’re working with on a project, and if I suddenly lost developers, et cetera, this isn’t going to go great. I think we’re saying it can still constitute a crisis that needs to be managed, maybe Crisis may seem like an extreme word, but actually all of these can constitute some action is needed to mitigate, as it were.
Jill:
It’s basically anything that could impact your ability to serve your clients. It’s your reputation. I think that’s where me and Paul are coming from, is that whole thing of you can have crises, but then it’s how you manage the communication of that crisis. Flapping, as you say, is not really a bad thing because at least you’re preparing, at least you’re thinking about it. That was the first thing I think me and Paul wanted to get across was that companies need to be aware of it. Companies need to actually consider Initially, what could go wrong and not put their head in the sand and think, Oh, it’s all going to be fine. Nothing will go wrong. Because things do go wrong, as Paul said. It might be exactly as Paul said, it might be something completely out of your jurisdiction that you have no control over. Flapping can be a good thing.
Lee:
Well, Tim is my business partner. He’s very cool-headed. I’m the person who flaps. He rolls his eyes and then, thankfully, he brings me down to work. But on that, you said being aware. How Can we be more aware? And how do we identify when either a potential crisis is looming or is actually happening?
Jill:
Well, I’m going to let Paul answer this one. Start with Paul.
Paul:
Thanks for that. Really, the What we’re going to do is at some point, and wherever you choose to do it the most comfortably, is just sit down and we just map it out. And when we’re working with clients, I mind map on a whiteboard, normally for a client, in terms in terms of them, right, what happens in the five key areas? What could happen to you and your business? What natural crises could trigger a need to manage comms for your business? And as we start to work through this, and we put the the framework the five areas down, that then starts to people say, Oh, well, hang on a minute. Well, what if so and so happens? Now, for example, and Jill and I were talking about this on the other day, if you have a key person in your organisation and everything hinges around that person. They may be the technical genius that manages all your in-house project management systems, and for whatever reason, they can’t come in to work, they might have a car accident, or something to go down with COVID or whatever. There’s an element there that does that suddenly become a business critical issue.
Paul:
And if they’re going to be off long term, you will have an operational crisis plan. So you may have the things that you would do normally. But sitting alongside that should be your comms your crisis comms that says, right, this person is responsible for product delivery in this particular area. How do we make that happen? And how do we tell clients there might be a delay? Because the last thing you want is clients going through whatever media channels they use and saying, Hey, these guys are rubbish. I ordered this for the 10th of March, and it’s now the 15th of September. Nobody’s talked to me. There’s those things, which comes down to something… I’ll let Jill expand upon this, but the Five Wise Men of PR is as applicable here in this scenario as it is in any good news piece or any promotional piece. You brought that up, Jill. I’ll let you have the glory on that one.
Jill:
Well, it’s the… Thank you, Paul. It is the who, what, why, where, when that we always talk about in PR, when you’re trying to put together a story for the press, you talk about what happened, why it happened, who it happened to, et cetera. Those principles, those words then relate really, really well to crisis comms planning as well. If you’re putting together or when you do put together that plan, it’s that very much that who’s going to deliver it? Have you got everybody’s numbers? I know we’ve spoken that the first step, as we said, would be to work out what your crises, is that the plural, could look like. We’ll go with that. We’ll go with that one. I’ve just made a word up. Your crises, what they actually look like. And then the next step is to actually plan for who’s going to… What does your plan look like? How are you going to deliver if something does go wrong? How do you cope with it? And who are the people? Where are the places? Silly things, maybe. Like, have you got logins for all of your social media accounts? What if the person that does your social media is actually on holiday at that time?
Jill:
You can’t get in. Little things like that.
Paul:
And just to pick up on that one, I And those people that use external agencies. So if you have a PR agency or a social media agency managing those two communications channels for you, do they understand what their responsibility is as part of your crisis comms plan? Because you may go out to your PR or social media agency and say, We’ve had a fire, it’s burnt down our production capacity, or there’s a major rail strike, the visitors are not going to get to our event, or whatever it may be, your PR agency and your social media agency may turn around and say, It’s not in our email. We’ve never been brief. Because there’ll be elements there. As an agency, we have professional indemnity insurance, and our contracts are back to back with our professional indemnity insurance that says, If we make a gaffe, we are covered for the gaffe we’ve made for you. But if somebody turns down and says, There’s a crisis, we need you to handle this, is that within the contract we’ve agreed and are we covered to do that for you? Because it needs to be… Again, people only think PR as…
Paul:
And I think this is where some of the misunderstandings occur. And PR is all about fluff. It’s all about the pretty, the happy, nice stuff and celebrities and photoshoots. Oh, isn’t it all lovely? But there is a very-That’s why we’ve got you on here, because you’re famous.
Lee:
We thought we’d get you on.
Paul:
We’ve come on to bring the mood down a bit. None of us cheerful, happy PR. Let’s get down into the dirt of it. Northern PL. Yeah. But there’s those bits that you need to think about, this has happened. Do we have call out to our agencies? Do they know what to say and who to say to? Because, again, a crisis might just involve your internal staff. It might be internal and customers. It might be a public crisis. Now, we’ve seen happenings in the events industry in the last six months where people were queuing up outside a venue to get in to see a concert. The concert had already been cancelled. The organising unit, the venue knew, but nobody bothered to tell the customers. And so that was delivered to them right at the very last minute.
Lee:
Whereas- That’s the worst, isn’t it?
Paul:
And it’s about timings, about who you’re going to tell, how quickly you’re going to tell them, priority order. So the long term reputational damage of a public venue The public are going to be a primary audience. They need to be kept informed. And I’m sure Jill will chip in on this one. We’re not, as you identified earlier, I’m such a young chap. I can just about remember the days when the Internet didn’t exist, and you waited every four weeks for the industry magazine to land. And in that, that’s where they broke the news story about something happening. And you’d got a couple of weeks to work out how you were going to respond, to contact the editor, to get them involved, to give your side of the case. Not anymore. You’ve got one person standing outside a venue not unable to get in, and they’re recording it live and streaming it down social media. So everyone’s now a citizen journalist. So the speed of news, and especially bad news, because bad news, what was the famous phrase, it’s halfway around the world before the good news gets its trousers on.
Lee:
Something like that.
Paul:
The speed of travel of bad news is exceptional. And social media has become a voracious consumer of bad news. And the ability of people to put that down with you. So that’s another thing. Who handles that? How do you pick that up? How quickly do you respond? Do you have some poor social media person sitting in your office, popped up on amfetamine, staying awake 24/7, just watching for something to happen? How effective is your social listening? Do you have tools in place for that? There’s an awful lot. Jill, sorry, I’ve talked for a minute now. You’re good.
Jill:
Let’s throw the ball back at me. Exactly as you were saying, I think Paul said earlier, you’ve got 20 minutes. I think the CRP, the PR and communications association said that it’s something like 20 minutes you’ve got, and we think it’s actually shorter than that before someone’s actually taken a photo and got it out there to the world. Excuse me. It’s that element of being Which brings us back to that being prepared. It could be that preparing just means writing down what your problems could be. Where are those single points of failures? Single points of failure, where are those in the organisation? Then also, where are those single points of failure in your comms plan as well? In that, are you relying on Joe to do X, but Joe’s on holiday? Okay, who can step in?
Lee:
I think what I’m hearing here as well, folks, is that the PR element people will often believe is reactive. Because you said that PR was predominantly people think it’s for the celebrities in that, but it’s also people think it’s for the, Oh, crap, we better clean up here and let’s get the PR folks involved to spin this a different way. What I’m hearing is PR is a part of the overall communications plan, and we need to be proactive, we need to be prepared, we need to identify. When I’m flapping, I am actually asking the who, what, where, why, when, but it’s just a little bit too late. It’s at the point where things have actually gone wrong, and now I’m asking those questions, and now I may need to get PR involved and everything else to clean up, which makes it way more stressful than actually identifying in advance, Okay, these are the third-party things that could affect my upcoming event, and these are the internal things that could affect my upcoming event. For example, a speaker cancelling last minute, how do I fill that slot? Maybe the keynote speaker is not going to show up.
Lee:
How do I communicate that to people and how do I replace that perceived value with something else? Having a plan for that. I never actually had a plan for that. All the events I’ve ever done, I’ve always hoped to God everyone shows up. On that, something that was outside of my control was 2020. In 2019, I launched my first ever conference. It was a resounding success, if I say so myself. I did what I thought was wise, which was on the last day of the event, I pre-sold the following year, which was 2020, and I nearly sold out all our tickets, which was amazing because they’d had such a great time. But this was now another in-person event in May at the height of lockdown coming up. I could see It was in February, March time that there might be some upcoming problems. Everyone was talking about this flu and it had all sorts of names back then. I was starting to get really worried. I was then like, I don’t know what to do. I was definitely flapping. I didn’t have a plan. I knew I couldn’t really refund everyone because the money had already gone into paying for venues and everything else like that, and I was still negotiating with sponsors.
Lee:
Leaving everything to last minute and starting to really, really panic. At first, I was digging my heels in emailing saying, This event’s definitely happening. We’re not going to let this stuff as yadi yadi. But then lockdown became a certainty and also a legality. There was no chance that I was not going to be able to run the event without breaking the law. That forced my hand and I had to say, Hey, everyone. At this point then, I had this struggle. I had no communication plan, so I had to work on everything last minute. I was like, Well, what do I do? I was like, Well, we’re going to do the event next instead. We’re going to postpone the event, but I’m also going to do an online event for you this year so that we can still all meet with the same speakers. We managed to pull that up, which was good. But we’ll throw in your tickets for next year for free because that was the only thing I could think of doing without refunding because people were asking for refunds and I’m like, Well, there’s no money here. The event needs to happen for there to be money.
Lee:
I scrambled my way through that. Honestly, I think some people don’t like me anymore. Most people do. I I think it worked out in the end of most people like, You’re really generous and you didn’t have to give us a follow-on event in person the following year and all that stuff, which was them to say. But I do know there are other people that probably felt annoyed with me and frustrated and all that’s somehow been robbed, et cetera. Have you guys got anything to speak into that story? A big mess.
Jill:
Covid was unprecedented. We have never been in a situation like that before. There were a lot of things happening that We were lots of companies were just finding their feet, just working out what they were going to do. But then we have had things like that before hit the events industry. We know when the volcano and the ash cloud happened, however many years ago that was, and that grounded flights, that impacted on events. Because we are in the very nature of pulling people together, there will be physical limitations to that. As you said, you might have a speaker cancel or a flight delayed that means that the speaker can’t get in. There are physical reasons why people haven’t been able to get together over the years. As you say, having a plan in place and working out, Okay, what would we do? What would you do now? I’m going to throw it back at you, Lee. What would you What would you do now then?
Lee:
I would make sure I had better terms for a start off. Okay. Because I hadn’t got them in place, the proper ones that said if there was an issue, I couldn’t do the event. You wouldn’t get a refund. I hadn’t got those terms in In theory, it was arguablyable as to whether I should be refunding people or what. I didn’t have anything like that set up. That was the one big thing I should have done in advance.
Jill:
Because if you listen to the World Health Organisation, people like that, which I don’t want to be really negative, but COVID could happen again. I don’t think it will happen in the same scale as it did lockdown, but we could come under another virus like that. I love the fact you’ve learned from your experience and that you’ve learned to actually, okay, we need the terms and There’s all these conditions in there. You would have a plan now. We all know how good virtual events can be. Actually, okay, what we would do is we would have a virtual event and we would postpone it for… When we did realise quite how long lockdown would last, did we? We all thought.
Lee:
I actually have to postpone the event for two years because I’d said next year, but there were still lockdowns the following year.
Jill:
Yeah, exactly. It was still happening. I think when it’s a global crisis like that, people are kind in the majority of cases as long as you communicate and as long as you are honest, as long as you are as honest as you can possibly be, I would say. That sounds a bit PR-ish and spinnish, doesn’t it? But it’s being honest and open. One of the best communication stories I’ve heard recently was when Alton Towers had the big accident. I think it was the Smiler roller coaster, and people were injured with that. And they were Very open and honest. They were very open and honest, and they were, even just to say, We don’t know. We don’t know what’s happening. We’re waiting for government guidance in your case. We’re waiting to find out. But we are looking into it just to get that reassurance, just to get those messaging out there. Just don’t go quiet.
Paul:
Yeah. In any crisis comm situation, and I certainly have heard people advising to the contrary, and it makes me cringe, is when they say, Oh, just say no comment. And if you want to throw the conspiracy theories to bone, no comment, what are they hiding? Why aren’t they going to comment? Why aren’t they speaking? Even if it’s a case of we know something’s happened, We’re looking into it. We will get back to you within a time frame and tell you what we know then. And at least then you set expectations on what your communications are going to be. But just flipping back to your example, I would say from what you said there in terms of reputational management, and okay, there’s always going to be one or two people that are going to bear a grudge and be grumpy about it forever. But in terms of reputational-wise, you handled it really well. The fact that the first thing was right, I need to tell everybody what’s happening, then I need to tell it. And that overcompensating in terms of delivery as well as communicating with people is really important. A very quick anecdote, when I was working PLC-side, a fuel delivery company put 20,000 gallons of heating diesel into a local river, and obviously that then killed everything in that stretch of river.
Paul:
It would have been very easy for us to just turn around and went, They did it their fault. Blamed them. But they were a small organisation. They got no media handling capabilities. And we could just see this spiralling out into a nightmare. So we just went on the communications offensive, and we took the element of responsibility ourselves. And we said, This has come off our industrial premises and into the river, so therefore we’re accepting that responsibility to do something. Operations Finally, the guys on the floor then brought in people to do a cleanup at our cost. The damage that was done to the fish stocks, we restocked the river. We then got all the local groups So you got local wildlife people, got the RSPCA, got the local press, brought them in to the premises and brief them in a makeshift briefing room about what we were doing, the actions we were taking. And we communicated the hell out of everything that we were doing to rectify We had a situation. And we went… The first photograph I saw, and the first thing we knew about it was in the local press, there was a picture taken from the other side of the river of an RSPCA guy holding a dead mallard in his arms, photographed laughed against our factory back wall, where only six months previously, I’d had six foot high letters of our corporate brand name put down the back of it.
Paul:
And you think, the things all lined up perfectly for us to be the villains of the piece. And we were in that first news article. Within three months, we were the heroes of the situation. And we didn’t do anything deliberately, but the press and the media worked out where the problem originated. And And then it was, well, we can’t believe they’ve done this. And it wasn’t actually their fault, but they’ve stepped in and they’ve done all this, told us that we’re doing all this. Real reputation saving exercise. Took a lot of work, took a lot of effort, but we had a plan in place. We had something that said, at this point, we trigger this. We know who the local press are for that particular site. Right, we get them involved. Who are the influencer organisations around? So get them involved. And that communicating, and careful communication. You don’t stand up and say, yeah, it was all It’s not our fault, so was. But it’s carefully distributing a message that says, We know something’s happened. We’re investigating this, but in the meantime, there’s a problem that needs dealing with. So we’re dealing with it. And that’s pretty much what you did.
Paul:
There’s a pandemic. We know there’s a pandemic that going to stop me having my event, but I’m going to make sure you can still do something. So I’m going to put my virtual event on, and I’ll even give you an in-person event afterwards. Now, that is overdelivering on that side of telling people. Now, as I say, I’m sure Well, even now, if you mention it in the local town where it happened, the people will still moan about my previous employer as being a filthy polluting horror story. The majority of people who were directly involved all thought we’re great. You’re never going to be able to catch Which are that last 2 % of people who are always going to have a moan. There’s always going to be those. The unfortunate thing is they also tend to be really vocal. So it’s how you deal with those people because they’re the ones that are going to be the thorn in your side in perpetuity. So So don’t ignore them, address their issues. And then once you’ve addressed the issues, if they keep coming back, you can then just point them back at the information you’ve already given them.
Paul:
Leading them to how in the wilderness, they can then start to gather more…
Lee:
Some momentum, as it were. Yeah.
Paul:
Yeah. And I think it’s important that you do address those issues, so don’t leave them hanging. But what you did, I think, for a flapper, you flapped that beautifully. He did. He did.
Lee:
I need a flap. If it had a plan, then I guess that we could have… The title of this show should be how to Stop Flapping and Start Planning. There you go. Genius.
Jill:
It depends on how you define flapping, because if you’re running around screaming, that’s not so helpful.
Lee:
I was definitely doing that at first.
Jill:
But if all you’re doing by flapping is just thinking the worst, it’s that. Think of the plan for the worst. Expect the best plan for the worst, isn’t it? That thing. As Paul said, it’s that classic customer service issue that if somebody has a problem in a customer service, classic customer service, somebody has a problem, that’s your opportunity to turn it around. Actually, some of your biggest advocates- That’s the story, isn’t it? Yeah, some of your biggest advocates can be people that initially had a problem with you, and then actually you love bombed them and turned it around, and they’re now your biggest advocates. It’s the same with crisis comms, isn’t it, Paul?
Paul:
Yeah, absolutely.
Lee:
On that then, just basic customer service. This is something that me and my wife talk about very often. We understand there are sometimes going to be issues, and it’s always how the people deal with the issues that decide whether or not we’re happy. Just a couple of weeks ago, we went on a last minute holiday. I won’t mention the company, but it was a lodge. It looked amazing and luxury on the website. It, so we booked it last minute deal, all that job. We all go as a family. When we showed up, there was certain cabinets were hanging off the wall and the bathrooms were dirty, et cetera. I just went and said, Look, we’re really disappointed because your website makes this look incredible. The lady was instantly, I’m so sorry, this definitely shouldn’t have happened. We’re going to send the maintenance over, we’re going to send the cleaners over to you and get this sorted out. That’s exactly what they did within minutes. There was four people in sorting stuff out. Clearly, there’d been some miscommunication internally and stuff like that, which was fine, and I get it. They’d had a busy season and they were coming right to the end of it.
Lee:
They made good. They replaced shower heads. They did all sorts. They gave the whole thing, and I think it took them 20 minutes to just make the whole place tip top, ship shape. We had a great holiday in the end, but they responded very quickly. They communicated well, they threw in the extras and made us feel good, etc. That was phenomenal. From feeling like we would never go back for that first half hour of anger and frustration and annoyance to, We’re going to book again next year because they delivered in the end. It’s huge, isn’t it?
Paul:
That’s where the operational and comms side cross over because operationally, they picked up the baton and ran with it, which headed off the need to roll out the crisis comms plan because they haven’t got a very angry view, photographing everything and slapping all over Instagram saying, This company is shocking. Look what they did. They did what any good organisation will do is they took the wind out of your sales straight away.
Lee:
Absolutely.
Paul:
A good company will overcompensate and say, Right, great. Take your family down to the pool. Go have dinner, go in the pool for free on us, and when you come out, we’ll have it all fixed, operational fixed. Then you come back here, wow. And then you’ve suddenly become, I hold my hand up to this, Love More, hate them, Virgin Atlantic. I love what they did. When I was still on the corporate side, I was heading over to the States to a conference, managed to drive my, and I have I admit to owning a BMW at some point in my life, drove over to- They’ve got indicators, my boy. I don’t know what the stalk is on the side. That’s what it is. I had to go to Manchester Airport in a blizzard and got there. And as I ran up to the check-in desk, and it was another famous British airline whose name sounds very similar to that. And I ran up to their deck. They were flying me down to Heathrow to fly out. And as I arrived at the desk, I gave them a ticket and said, Look, this is it. And they were very helpful to the point where they realised I was connecting with a virgin flight, at which point they said, Oh, well, I’m sorry, it’s boarded and stuff.
Paul:
And I could see the plane with the stairs still there. And I was thinking, No, no, I can see people still getting on. You can get me out to that plane if you really wanted. So that was cut and dried. They weren’t going to do it. So I walked around to the Virgin desk. I explained to this lady behind the counter what was happening. And she was brilliant. She just said, Right, okay, boof. Check your package in here. Next time you’ll see that is when you’re out in Florida, in Miami, then that can go through. We’ll sort you out a connecting flight. We’re going to have to bounce you here in New York. And they did all this. But when I landed at Heathrow, the bit that blew me away was I was walking up to the transfer desk and there’s a young lady behind the check-in staff. She came out and said, Mr. Richardson?
Lee:
What?
Paul:
Who? And she said, Well, come this way. We’ve got you on this flight, blah, blah, blah. And I just said, So how did you know? She said, My colleague in Manchester rang me up and said, there’s going to be this very frustrated, flapping, panicky-looking bloke dressed like this. Coming down to your coming up to the desk. And that was it. They thought to me, I’m about to go. I arrived in Miami, bags were there and everything. And now I’ve told that story probably a thousand times. So Mr. Branson has got a thousand adverts from me for his transatlantic airline. And that’s because his staff were able to intercept the problem. And we drifted into customer service away from crisis comms. But what they did do was they prevented a crisis comms instance happening. So I wasn’t sitting there, I mean, back in those days, writing very strong letters with myagement and quill saying, ‘Potence on the Internet when the Internet’s invented. ‘ But they stopped me complaining and turned me into an advocate for them. So I’ve suddenly become his best advertising. I mean, whatever else you may think of him as an ally, nothing.
Paul:
In that instance, they behaved brilliantly. Absolutely. Absolutely, Brind me.
Jill:
That does go back into communications. A long time ago, I did some consultancy. Really, really weird situation for Wood Hill Prison in Milton Keynes It was random. I met the governor of Wood Hill, which is a maximum security prison near where I live. When I said consultancy, I just chatted him for a bit, gave him some advice, really. He said to me, Oh, the local press only cover us when something goes wrong, when somebody escapes. It’s like, Yeah, I can see why they would do that. Somebody escapes, something- That’s going to get eyeballs.
Lee:
I said, Well, and They said, They never ask for our opinion on it.
Jill:
They never ask for what happened. They always just publish and not talk to us. I said, Well, you need to build a relationship with them. You need to actually invite them in on the good times. Show them around, get to know them, get them on side, build advocates in the press. And any company should be doing that so that if something does go wrong, that journalist knows that they could actually ring the managing director up, bring the PR off and go, I’ve heard this. What’s happening? And you’ve got that person on side. And they might still publish, but at least nine times out of 10, especially in the events industry, they’re good guys. They’re not horrible journalists from the red top the events industry, they are actually… But they’re still looking for a story, but they would actually want to get your side of it as well. So build relationships. As Paul said, that advocacy follows through to building press relations as well as customers as well.
Lee:
Yeah. Customers, I know we focused on that a little bit, but they can be the source of those crises, can’t they? Because I did take pictures, for example, of that unit that I was in. I think you 20 minutes or something like that. Had they not within that first 20 minutes, because it literally was 20 minutes, with regards to calming me down, et cetera, and rectifying the issue, then I probably would have posted. I’ve got 8K followers on Instagram. Many people who would be interested in the UK, who would be interested in going on a holiday there. To them, that would then become very rapidly a crisis. Then if I’d have used specific hashtags or whatever of that brand, then boom. We’ve gone from disgruntled customer to, Oh, not only do we need to sort this guy out, but also we’ve got it all over the internet with people sharing stories on his comment about how when they showed up, it was terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, journalists pick up stories from Twitter, from Instagram. I read one today with the tweet embedded.
Jill:
I won’t comment about lazy journalism or is it just a source of information? You could argue that it’s out there in the public domain. If people are talking about it, they want to cover it in the press. So, yeah, you could end up sparking a huge story on the BBC about it.
Paul:
It would be interesting to understand whether that particular resort or accommodation had any form of crisis comms and escalation process. Because, again, when you’re looking at your crisis comms, it’s not only top down, the management spotting something to be aware of. Normally in organisations, the first people to be aware of something just about to go boom, the people at the grand level. So that person who helped you out, did they, as part of their process, go, I’ll just alert whoever’s head of comms or whoever’s the comms person. Got this guy, we’ve really let him down. Probably need to be aware, just keep an ear out. He might post on social.
Lee:
Yeah, I look like that. That guy.
Paul:
He looks a bit dodgy. When you were videoing him talking to you and you were asking the questions. That sounds quite… Yeah, that sounds like a joke, but some people are really that, get that aggressive on social media. It has changed the dynamic in crisis comms completely.
Lee:
Especially so as well when people are at the event. So if someone’s at your event and something’s going well, like big queues for the restrooms or whatever, there’s all of that. So planning, I guess, ahead for that. And if someone is there at the event, there’s WiFi, there’s 4G or 5G. Now you don’t even need WiFi. It’s not even a problem anymore in half of these venues. So people can absolutely go live and start lambasting your event. This is terrible. It’s crowded. No one showed up or whatever, however they want to spin it online.
Paul:
There was a lady injured at a con convention in in the US last year. She was an influencer in that particular area. I won’t mention any brands. It’ll save me getting sued out of existence. And she was involved in a piece of entertainment on one of the stands, exhibition stand, surrounding it. And it was a gladiator-type participatory thing, where it was a bit like the Poogle sticks and you bashed each other with these big.
Lee:
Is this the girl who broke her back?
Paul:
Yes, that might be the one.
Lee:
Yes, that was the It was all over the Internet. Poor girl. It was indeed.
Paul:
She was actually posting that in terms of that she’d been injured and nobody came to help her. There were people around who followed her that were filming her, that filmed the incident. And that went from zero to a million miles an hour in minutes. And the repercussions were huge. Those things, it’s small things that can do that. Again, you can remember, was it Tani grey Thompson went to collect her sports personality of the year at the awards ceremony? And as she trundled down to the front, they realised that there were only steps up to the stage. Oh. Yeah, bigger. But those things, it’s thinking around those what ifs, what ifs, what ifs. Now, that was an operational what if. But the PR comms afterwards, how How do you even explain what you’ve done there and why that’s not been taken into account? The immediate contrition and willingness to do better next time.
Lee:
We screwed up and putting that out there, we have absolutely screwed up. Yeah.
Paul:
In those moments, it is a hands up. There is no excuse. But knowing you have to do that is one of the things because it was natural reaction is to go to defensive mode. Oh, that’s a second diner’s fault.
Jill:
Or is Or bury head in sand and it will blow over what it was. Or even it’s perfectly acceptable, isn’t it, Paul? We’ve spoken about this. You have a statement ready and you may never have to use it. I’ve done that before with clients, where a client’s lost a massive contract very publicly or something like that, or a venue has been sold or something like that. And we’ve been ready to put something out if we’re asked, but we’re not. So we’re not going to raise it actually because no one… It was injured or anything like that. It was just a business decision. We didn’t publish it, but we were ready just in case.
Paul:
And going back to your event of cancellation is, I would hope that every organiser, at any event of any type has a process for saying, if we’re cancelling this event, how far out do we do it? Who do we tell? What do we say? And looking at the criteria for why it’s happening, which of those are the influencing factors? And again, focus and clarity. If you said, oh, it’s because, yes, there’s a fire out in Indonesia that’s caused us to cancel the event in London. And by the way, oh, yeah, we haven’t got the chief executive. It just sounds like a whole bunch of excuses. There’ll be one trigger. Be focused, be clear. This has happened and that’s what’s caused it, et cetera. And clarity and overcommunication. Can’t to dress that enough.
Jill:
Absolutely. That hands up. And there’s a lovely story. We were talking about this earlier. There’s a great book called Live at the Brixton Academy, written by Simon Parks, who was the guy that bought the Brixton Academy for a pound in 1982, turned it into, it was a virtually derelict building, turned it into the amazing music venue that it turned into in the ’80s and the ’90s and then sold it to O2. He had booked Nirvana to play. They were coming to the UK, they were going to be touring, and Nirvana were playing at the Brixton Academy. We all know then what happened, that Kurt Cobain died, took his own life, and suddenly, Simon Parks was left with having sold out, sold every single ticket for that show. And because of the pre-publicity and other things going on, if he’d have had to have refund every ticket, he’d have gone on. That was it. There was no more Brixton Academy. So he was in that crisis situation. And he’s a genius in that what he did was he realised that those tickets could actually become collector items.
Lee:
This is the gig that Nirvana never made. Oh, my word, yeah. I’d never thought. Absolutely.
Jill:
He was very creative.
Lee:
The last ever, yeah.
Jill:
Yeah, exactly. These were tickets that had gone on sale for a gig that never happened. He put an ad in the NMS me. He went on radio saying, If anyone’s got their ticket and wants to sell it back to us, please get in touch. He created a demand for those tickets as these collector items, we’ve got collectors desperately trying to get hold of their tickets, please sell them back to us. Hardly anyone did.
Lee:
I felt like reverse psychology. I feel like a big plate.
Jill:
I’m not supposed to people should do that. It just shows that whole creativity that he had to flip it and think and the fact he talks about the book’s brilliant. If you’re interested in anything to do with it.
Lee:
I’m totally reading that book. I’d never heard of it. So thank you. And folks, if you’re listening, we’ll put that in the show notes as well, so you can go ahead and check that out. I get it on your Kindle or wherever and enjoy.
Paul:
I think all of this is down to every organisation can have something like that happen to them. I mean, that is so far out of his control. And there’s nothing Anything he can do about it, he’s just had that pile of brown and smelly land in his lap and how he communicated to resonate the situation. And that, he didn’t have a plan. But if you use that as an example of what can happen, It should really give people the impetus to do an assessment, to have a look at what they think might be their risks. And as the military say, no plan survives its first contact with the enemy. You’re I’m not going to be able to roll out a comms plan, a crisis comms plan, and everything drop into place and work perfectly. But if you know you’ve got something that you can go to, that you can say, here’s my starting point. I can jump off from here. I know I need a I need a spokesperson. I need two spokespeople. I need a substitute. I need this. I need that. It gives you that starting place. And even if you’ve got some pre-existing templates, I can tweak that statement because it’s not the widget, it’s whatever is that’s not working.
Paul:
So yeah,. Those things it gives you. The other thing Jill and I were talking about beforehand is, and it’s something I believe passionately in, is don’t treat it like you do when you get a business Consultant comes in and they write you a consultancy plan, you put it in a ring binder, it goes on the shelf behind you and you never touch it again. It’s a living, breathing document. Your business changes on a daily basis. The market changes on a daily basis. Get it out, review And if you can test it. I was lucky to be part of the best crisis PR test ever in that I managed to crash a military helicopter into a massive LPG tank and blew up half of Doncaster. That was wonderful. And for a lad from-
Lee:
That’s where I’ve seen you before.
Paul:
Yeah, well, as a lad from Rothering, blowing up half of Doncaster was one of the best days of my life.
Lee:
Sounds amazing.
Paul:
I know, a bit of South Yorkshire There’s a rivalry there. But what they did, it was the Civil Contingency Organisation, approached as if they could run a test. So we scoped out what could happen. And the Five Brigade were involved, the police were involved. We had people volunteering to lay down in the gutter on the road with makeup and blood and bits of plastic metal sticking out their chest. And we ran the whole scenario that this explosion happened at five o’clock in the morning. And so all the thing went out. I got my crisis comms plan. I was absolutely copulare. It was going to be… And as I’m driving into sight, the civil contingency guy stepped up and said, Hi, who are you? And he knew who I was, but we were obviously role-playing this. Who are you? Explain what I was. And he said, Terrible. Sorry, sir. Head office has been blown up because that’s the way the LPG tank was facing, and it’s taken out the entire building. So my command and control centre was a pile of rubble. So he just thrown that Kerb. And obviously I went, Oh, thank you very much, sir.
Paul:
That’s very you. Thank you for doing that. But it’s those, right, well, what do we do? Do we have a second place to go to? If this happens, where do we go? And this chap was having a great… He was on a field day because he was throwing these. The fire service were coming down the road. He said, Sorry, these high tension cables are fallen down. There’s no electrical current running across the road. And the local electricity company I’ve called them this off as a high risk area. You can’t access the fire this way. So they had to go all the way around, Doncaster, come back in from the other side. But these are real things that happen. And we’d organised for the press to come down to watch us do this so they could see that we were a responsible organisation, and we were working with everybody else to make sure everybody was safe in that part of Doncaster. And they came down and we then had to move them to a different place where we said there was going to be a briefing. And I explained what was happening. And they then were writing very nice things about us that professionally handled, well done.
Paul:
So part of that pre-empting anything happening in our organisation happened there. But that rolling it out, you start to look and go, oh, hang on, there’s a hole here. And ours was, what happens if the head office goes? We haven’t got a second contingency plan. So get your plan off the wall, run it, roll it out, even on a desktop exercise, sit in the boardroom and a role play in the boardroom. You don’t need to go absolutely out into the field and close your venue and tell for your-
Lee:
And blow up buildings, no.
Paul:
No, I’m just lucky I got to play with that in that particular scenario.
Jill:
Must have been brilliant.
Paul:
It’s great fun. And the thing that stick in my mind is one of these volunteers walking out of the place they were getting changed in this particular room we had set aside for them, cheerfully said, Morning. He’s got a big piece of steel sticking on his chest, the wood all down his front. Morning. Then he walked over the road and laid down on the pavement. Fantastic. Brilliant. But just running your own, because as you run through those scenarios, you can say, Well, hang on a minute. What about that particular media channel or that press outlet, or if this happens, how do we contact them? And as Jill is saying, in those scenarios, you’re un right. What if whoever it is that runs our social account is away on holiday that day, or it’s the weekend and they’ve gone camping in the Lake district. What do we do? How do we cover that off? And it will pull all those little wrinkles out, and you’re never going to cover them all. Never going to get them all. But you will find those little ones that could be a lifesaver should anything happen. And hopefully, fingers crossed, you never, ever have to do it.
Paul:
But it’s like car insurance. You never want to pay it, and you never want it until the point that somebody bumps into you. And then it’s the best thing since slice bread.
Lee:
Absolutely. It’s similar to business continuity planning as well. I mean, this is essentially a part of business continuity planning. If your head office goes, you need to test, what’s your backup? Where’s your data? How are you going to restore all your data? How are you going to get your workforce back to work? Is it going to be a building somewhere? Is it going to be from home? Whatever that is, test the plan, test the plan. Test it again six months later, etc. Keep reviewing it. I mean, I think the biggest takeaway I’m getting then is number one, it’s okay to flap because that means you care. I need to be considering my who, what, where, when, how, which I can’t remember the exact one. I think it was who, what, where, why, when. Was it something like that? Something like that, yeah. When I’m flapping, that’s what I’m doing. But if I can start to have the who, what, where, when in advance, that’s going to be extremely helpful. Start to then go back to basics and work out a whole range of scenarios that could happen. We’re planning for the best, planning for the worst, hoping for the best Write some plan, even have some communication plans in place, as it were, for those sorts of scenarios.
Lee:
Make that a living, breathing document, so don’t have it up on the shelf, but actually check it regularly. Then role play some of those because in the events industry, we’re not going to be blowing up any buildings. That sounds like you’ve had an epic pass there, but we can at least role play in the boardroom, in a meeting, on a Zoom call, however that is. What do we do if keynote speaker doesn’t arrive or venue has a fire the night of, how are we communicating this? Or someone at the event does this and our MD is not there or who, what, where, why? All of that good stuff. From the end of this, I feel better about myself. I feel like I’ve learned an awful lot. I’m also a huge fan of pulse stories here. I need to learn more, mate. I’d love to have you both on the show for us to carry on this conversation because we have run out of time, but I feel like there is so much more that we could all talk about. So I’ll be sliding an email to you both to try and get you back on soon.
Lee:
But before we do wrap up, I’d love to just hear from you the best ways that we can connect with you both, and then we shall say goodbye.
Jill:
Oh, I’m Jill Hawkins on LinkedIn or jill@aniseedpr.com. Or, yeah, that’s pretty much it.
Paul:
Yeah, I’m Paul Richardson. I’m on LinkedIn. You can find me there through the company, Vividink. And vividink. Info is the web address. My email is paul@vividink. Info. Just happy to get in touch and have a chat with people.
Lee:
Well, thank you so much, folks. If you are still here, well done for making it this far. If you’re watching on YouTube, give us a like, subscribe, and all of that good stuff. Let us know in the comments what your biggest takeaways were. If you’re listening in your car, keep focused on the car driving, etc. But do be sure to come and check out the show notes over on Event Engine com later on to check out the links to connect with these two wonderful people. So both of you, thanks again for being on the show. Have a wonderful day.
Jill:
Thanks for having us.
