josh morton's posterous

I had the pleasure and opportunity to present a workshop on crisis communications last Friday at the DePaul University "Get In the Loop" conference, hosted by the DePaul chapter of PRSSA. Everyone at DePaul was great and the students that came in from other chapters asked solid questions and were eager to learn about a career in PR. I would have loved to do a full-scale crisis simulation, but we only had 45 minutes. Instead, I decided to focus on something that is often not given enough focus during a crisis: messaging.

A common line you hear almost everywhere these days is that, with the new digital environment, corporations have lost control of their message. That may be mostly true when you think of what happens after messages are disseminated, but that doesn't excuse companies from not having good messaging in the first place. Companies still have complete control over what they say, how they say it and where they say it, and that ability can influence the dialogue about issues and situations. So, instead of focusing on how to utilize Twitter or video or a corporate Web site during a crisis, we talked about message mapping during an outbreak of E. coli. This seemed timely given the recent increase in the rates of foodborne illness. We discussed our target audiences, brainstormed questions from media, government and consumers, and then divided into groups to devise tailored messages to each stakeholder group.

In the end, we were able to have a more effective conversation about strategy, and then about the best channels to use to disseminate the messages to the right audience. I hope the students enjoyed it. Most of our discussion took place outside of the presentation slides themselves; however, I've posted them here in case they are useful to others.