Irish Pork, and how not to manage an online communications crisis

Several weeks ago I attended a free workshop on Online PR, generously hosted in Dublin by online PR and marketing company, Mulley Communications. The course outline was:

1. Basics of Online Comms
2. Developing a Communications Bible
3. Developing a Communications Philosophy
4. Working with: Blogs, Forums, Twitter etc.
5. Finding Tools – Who is talking about you online?
6. Crisis Communications

The only condition of participation was that attendees would blog or tweet (there was some livetweeting on the day under the hashtag #mulleycomms) about the course, or any aspect of it that we found particularly interesting. I’m going to do the latter and talk a little about one of the case studies that was used as an example of bad online PR.

Run a search on Google.com for irish pork, and you’ll see that all of the results on page one are negative, and from a variety of authoritative sites. At the time of writing, these including news sites such as the BBC, Sky News, The Guardian, The Irish Times, RTÉ, The Times (UK) and the The Independent (UK), as well as a couple of other sites such as the UK Food Standards Agency and the website of a European Commission funded food standards initiative.

All of this negative content is focused around a single event, the dioxin contamination incident which lead to the Irish Pork Crisis of 2008.

Due to the pork industry’s uncoordinated response to the damaging news, today not a single result on page 1 of Google for the search term ‘irish pork’ (or pages 2, 3, 4, or 5 for that matter) is postitive or controlled by anyone in the their industry.

We learned from Damien Mulley that what the agencies involved (Bord Bia or the Food Safely Authority maybe) should have been done when the crisis blew up, was to create a response page on one of their websites, even if only with a couple of lines of information to begin with. As events unfolded, the information could be added to and updated, and hopefully news agencies would have linked to it. This page would have become a central source of information, and as a result would become a central source of trusted information.

(From an SEO point of view, this page would fast be considered authoriative by the search engines, and even just one authoriative page is a good starting point for populating more of the reults with your own pages or sites.)

Damien went on to apply this to what a business should do if it finds itself in the middle of a bad publicity storm, in a series of steps, and it’s recommended reading for anyone in business.

Summary

Having seen Damien speak a few times now, I can testify that he’s a natural public speaker and has no problems getting a point across. He’s excellent at what he does, which is teaching people and businesses how to communicate better. I’d have no problem recommending him if you or your company needs a crash course, or more, in online communications.

Thanks also to Darragh Doyle, the public face of forum site Boards.ie, who spoke brilliantly about the security breach which had happened only two days before, and Noel Rock who gave us a great account of the happenings around what started as a Facebook group, Soccer Stars for Haiti (accompanying website), getting the soccar stars on board, dealing with the media and more.