in case of emergency…

Katya has an extraordinary post today on how to manage what back in the day would have been called a PR crisis.

Read her post, copy or Evernote it, and don’t lose it.

In a prior life I found myself ensconced in a number of fairly ugly high profile communications crises. If I had known half of what is in Katya’s how-to, I would have fewer scars.

I have only one friendly addition to her advice – don’t try to correct the record over a trivial fact that someone has gotten wrong. In other words, if someone has publicly charged that your CEO has had an affair with four interns, don’t go on the record to say “you’re wrong it was really only three.”

Listen to what your critic is really saying and engage around the larger point they are making — not the irrelevant details.