Larry D. Lauer

I argued in last week’s post that standard crisis management procedures go out the window when there is no way to quickly find and report the truth about what happened. In crises like the one at PSU, facts dribble out over time. Sometimes it takes a long period of time. All that professional communicators can do in a situation like this is to report the facts as they come to know them.

There are always people who think they knew there were problems for a long time, and they were being covered up.  But in the case of truly professional communicators, there is a difference between this kind of “knowing,” and knowing for certain. I remember a situation where a television news director said to me, “You and I both know there are problems in that program.” And I replied, ” If you could prove it you would have already reported it, and the same goes for me!”    

A retired PSU professor wrote me following my last post pointing out that while I may be right about knowing all the facts at the moment a crisis breaks, “the ‘myth’ of  ‘JoePa’ was officially endorsed and nurtured by the PSU PR people and used for fund-raising for years.  What part does communication play, he asked, in repairing the damages?”

My response is that a two-part initiative is required.  The first part is to handle each moment when new facts emerge as a new crisis: Prepare a fact sheet, appoint the most appropriate spokesman, tell the whole story as now understood, and do it quickly. 

But a second part is now most critical: Clarify your brand identity message points, find student and academic stories that reinforce those points, and tell those stories aggressively in all your media platforms. Focus your efforts on your most important publics, and be prepared to sustain the effort indefinitely. In short, you must treat the situation as if you are building a new brand.

When both parts are implemented separately, but concurrently, eventually added crisis facts decline and brand reinforcement stories dominate.  In time, the brand is indeed restored. How long it takes will vary related to how long it takes to get all the crisis facts out, and exhausted.

Some have reported this week that PSU crisis repair will not take as long as many think.  I say, if all the bad apples disappear quickly, and legal proceedings unfold efficiently, these reporters could be right as far as the general public is concerned.

But, I speak from experience when I said last week that many associated with the institution will feel personally betrayed, including those professional communicators who bought into the myth. For them, deep and sour feelings will continue for a long time.