Page 103 - Crisis Communication Practical PR Strategies

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8 84 Crisis Communication
too much and not saying enough. It is not hard to leave everyone dis-
satisfied.
In short, these interactions are ripe with opportunity but fraught
with down-side risk for reputation building. Nonetheless they remain
the way financial constituents form important judgements about man-
agement, centring on the types of questions that become pivotal
during a crisis. They involve four basic areas:

1. Credibility – how have management managed corporate disap-
pointments in the past? Did they initiate meetings to talk about it,
or did they run and hide?
2. Confidence – have management set clear and realistic benchmarks
for the business, have they delivered on what they said they would,
and not hyped or over-promised?
3. Competence – have executive management proved that they have a
grasp on the details of the business?
4. Execution – is there depth of management in place that can execute
what needs to be done?

JetBlue has devoted considerable energy and care to these kinds of
questions among its financial audiences. It had been described in some
quarters as a darling of the investment community. That, of course,
was before the meltdown in the winter of 2006, when the airline
stranded thousands of passengers at New York’s JFK Airport and kept
some trapped on aircraft for up to 10 hours.
Clearly, JetBlue made critical business errors that exacerbated the
crisis. Its fate was still not resolved when this book went to press. But
from a financial point of view, it seems clear that the company could
have fared much worse. During the month following the crisis, the
stock never went below its 52-week low. And while there were investor
critics, there were just as many supporters – including Merrill Lynch,
which called the stock ‘oversold’ not long after the crisis.
In short, good communication now pays reputation dividends in
crises. Here is an overview of five key programme supplements that
can both improve public company communication and simultaneously
help with crisis readiness:

1. Know your institutional shareholders
For this task, most companies rely on public filings, such as 13f forms
in the United States. In normal times, this approach suffices for most
companies. During a crisis, management need better intelligence: 13f
filings only reflect an institution’s position at the end of the most recent