Thursday, February 28, 2013

Managing your communiqué during the coming General elections


It is four days to Kenya’s first General Elections under the new constitution and many multi-nationals, corporates, Small and Medium sized companies and even individuals are working tirelessly to develop crisis communication strategies in readiness to this historic event. Consumers have been advised to shop in plenty since most retail stores will be closed during the electioneering period. One might question why but the last time Kenya held its General Elections in 2007, the day to day running of businesses were disrupted and many Kenyans lost their lives attributed to the 2007/08 Post-Election violence brought about by the disputed presidential results.

In this regard, Kenyans and the business community are taking precautionary measures through ensuring that they come up with impactful crisis management plans to counter any eventualities.

Crisis communications are tricky situations that require careful navigation. If you foresee a crisis, it is good PR practice that you manage how you will break the news to the world. Being proactive and breaking the news to media with your key messages in place and your spokespeople delivering the information can help mitigate damage and risk.The sure-fire way to escalate your business’s crisis situation is to be caught flat-footed — or, in a PR crisis, with both feet in your mouth.

A crisis communication strategy is not always the ultimate weapon against a crisis, no matter how many weeks you’ve spent analyzing the weak points in your security system, setting up a standby call centre to address customers in case of the system, calling your friendly media to maintain the relationship- all your efforts are wasted without a proper holding statement ready for release.

Each holding statement is unique for a particular business, but the basic principles are the same. The holding statement must address the crisis head-on and without any doublespeak, acknowledge that something wrong is going on, offer immediate information, and resolve to address the media and public again once all the facts have been collected.   And, most importantly, you must show sincerity, genuine concern and appreciation for the crisis situation.

Apply this general approach when your business needs to speak, and you will buy the precious time necessary for a more coordinated, concentrated response to any problem factors that may arise.

And with that let me embark on preparing the holding statements for the coming general elections where either Uhuru Kenyatta or Raila Odinga will be Kenya's 4th president.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Kenyan Elections; the right time for a Brand clean up exercise.


The thought of receiving bad publicity has always been the worst fear for any PR practitioner .We live and work dreading the day we will wake up in the morning and find our brands languishing in bad press.

But on many occasions we release some news knowing that we will receive bad press for it and we can do nothing about it. When your client decides that they are reducing on their head count, all a spin master can do is to try and sugarcoat the whole exercise by calling it a “restructuring process that is aimed at re engineering the brand route to success” Ha-ha!! You are simple firing people because you cannot afford that wage bill.

Kenya Presidential Debate
Coming back home, it is clear that the first quarter will see the politicians dominating our dailies (see my previous blog) while many  of the PR practitioners are cursing the editors for denying them an opportunity to boast their brand’s AVE, I see this period as an opportunity to do a lot of ‘house cleaning’ as a brand. This is the right time to carry out all the activities that would easily have generated bad publicity.

Incase your client is planning to carry out a restricting exxcersice, sorry I meant planning to fire people, this is the right time to do so because it will not only generate little interest in the media but it also a time where you can evade sensitive stakeholders like unions (FKE & COTU) because they are all focused on aligning themselves with the next government.

Recently, a local Telco successfully revised their mobile money rates, but because all and sundry were busy finding out who their next governor would be they literally survived a customer’s uproar. To me, that’s a clear case of a would-be PR crisis being executed well and in a timely manner.

My interaction with many crisis PR teams have revealed that marketers tend over-estimate the negative impact of bad publicity on their target audience. So this is the time to convince them to drop that shitty product that they have feared to pull out of the shelves ,after all most people do not have the attention span or inclination to pay close attention to the details until after they elect the new President, Governor, Senator, Women Representative, Member of Parliament and County Representative respectively.

Young PR Kenya speak: If the attention that was accorded to the Kenyan presidential debate is anything to go by, then any corporate can ‘escape with murder’ because we are all immersed in politics