How do you manage media requests if a crisis happens all of a sudden, the phone's ringing off the hook. What I recommend is you come up with a statement. And it should be something you should be able to say in about 60 to 90 seconds a brief summary of the facts of what happened as you know them. Your three message points and sound bites. Here's what I believe is the best practice actually recording a video from the CEO whoever the highest ranking official is, on premises, create a video, and it can be done just with a cell phone. I would then post it on your website on all of your social media accounts, email it to any reporter who's reached out, email it to any reporter who you think might even have a remote interest in your organization.
And then I would let all the media know you're going to have a full fledged press conference. Ideally in about a half an hour. Put it out there too. Everyone, do not just hide behind a text press release that you put on your website. I'm amazed at what a huge, huge important serious companies still think they can get away with that. And you have to sift through their website for about 10 hours to find way way at the bottom.
Eight clicks in boring, dry press statement all text, no video from the CEO. No answering your basic questions and it just sends the message up. We're guilty. We're hiding. We've got something to hide from. I think if you just overwhelm the media right from the beginning and show them hey, we're not hiding anything.
We're reaching out. We want to work with you during this time. We want to keep you in the loop. So we're putting out information in a video format. a radio station could pull the audio From your YouTube video, your Facebook video or if you have it on Vimeo and you're also letting the media now, we're not just hiding behind our press release or video, we're going to answer your questions. Now if you're in a remote location, you may also want to let reporters know that there's going to be speakerphone and any reporter wants to call in, can ask questions.
Now, you may be a smaller organization, smaller media market, there may only be three or four reporters who are covering your beat, in which case, you may want to just answer them all do interviews, one after another. First come first serve as long as everyone is taken care of, and no one feels like you've excluded them because Oh, they wrote something negative about you eight years ago. So you're not going to talk to them. Now. That's not the time to settle scores. Now is the time to let the media know that you're not hiding That you know what's going on, you're doing everything you can to make the situation better, to try to help people to try to solve the problem.
You're working with every other legal regulatory agency who could possibly be involved with this. You're expressing the appropriate level of sympathy as human beings, companies are made up of human beings organizations are made up of human beings, to anyone who has been harmed. You need to just proactively get it out there and get it out there quickly. You may have a great message, but if the reporter has to call you 10 times, drive around five exits around your factory or plant to get in, sneak in crawl into the wires. To ask you a question and you say the exact same thing. It's going to have a different impact on the story.
The sheer fact that you've reached out to them that you've been proactive is going to help you again Deal, the media coverage might still not be great. But it'll be infinitely better than if you make the reporters claw and scratching work to get at you do not make reporters work to get to you. during a time of crisis. You need to not act like you're happy about this, obviously. But you need to act very enthusiastic about getting the important messages out to the public as soon as possible and you're happy to talk to anyone and everyone about this.