NOTE: FOR SOME REASON, THE BLOG DID NOT LIKE THE URL FOR THIS STORY AND WOULD NOT LET ME INCLUDE IT AS A LINK. I INCLUDED THE URL FOR THE MAIN WEB PAGE INSTEAD. YOU WILL HAVE TO DO A SEARCH FOR THE STORY USING THE TITLE NAME. MY APOLOGIES FOR THE EXTRA WORK.
For public relations firms handling crisis management, the only thing faster than a New York minute is an Internet minute.
“There is an unfortunate belief out there that if something is on the Internet, it must be true,” says Bruce Hicks, a consultant for Griffin Integrated Marketing who has handled the likes of airline crashes and office-building fires for nearly 40 years. “You’ve also got a lot of blurring of news media with non-news media. If you take what happened to United Airlines in September, a six-year-old story of UA’s bankruptcy appeared with the date lost, was picked up by a Google search and the perfect storm hit United that day. It really shows the power of the Internet, and that means you have to be prepared. You can’t wait until it hits the fan.”
And respond you must, says Hicks, even with a statement such as: “We know something bad happened, and we will tell you more when we have more information.”
Business executives must realize that as technology capabilities increase, so must response times, says Hicks, noting that bloggers and critics pick up and spread rumors at the speed of the Internet.
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” he says, “and the media abhors it even more.”
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