Q. The company I work for forbids me from talking to the press (including IR magazine). All comments come exclusively from our public relations officer. That’s fair enough, but when there’s a financial story to tell, I do feel better qualified to tell it. How can I convince management of this?
A.We all deserve our 15 minutes of fame, but companies like having a central point for contact with the press to ensure consistency in their messages. Those companies with the best track records in communications usually operate this way.
However, it’s also true that investors read the papers and watch the news, too, so any message that comes from the press is effectively an IR message. There will be times, particularly when a company has a financial message to deliver such as results or an acquisition, when the IRO is just as good, if not probably somewhat better, at dealing with the press.
But interchanging the role of IR and PR for press contact in moments like that can only work if the two teams enjoy a first-rate working relationship. In some companies, you’ll often find the two of them sitting opposite each other.
So if you’re really keen to see your name in print, why not offer to help with the financial messaging a bit more, or even to brief the more technically-minded press like the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. Once you’ve proven you can do it effectively then management may be more likely to let you to share the burden.
Q. My company doesn’t have a specific procedure for dealing with a potential crisis, probably because we haven’t had one yet. What are the mechanisms for ensuring that such contingency plans do exist and how can I go about laying these out with the management? Specifically, what role should the CEO play and what should my role be?
A. I don’t believe you don’t have a plan for dealing with a financial crisis the same way I don’t believe your company can function without a computer. There must be emergency procedures to follow in case your computer system collapses or headquarters burns down, for example. It’s called a disaster recovery plan. Go and find out what it is.
Once you find out, take a copy to your CEO and say, ‘Here’s our disaster recovery plan. But there are other potential disasters besides computer crashes. What happens in the event of a financial crisis?’ After that, it’s the role of the CEO to instruct you to prepare such a plan, unless you’ve already shown some initiative and come up with your own draft. If you can’t do it yourself, there are plenty of companies that can prepare crisis communications plans for you.
Q. What is the best time in the week to release negative information to the market? Alternatively, what’s the best time to release positive information?
A. It’s true that when companies have terrible things to say they make the announcement on a holiday – Labor Day in the US, say, or Christmas Eve – when people are unlikely to read the paper or watch the news. But be warned: it could backfire. The downside of a public holiday is papers won’t have much to write about so they might pick your little piece of disastrous information and do a big feature on it. Worse, other spin-meisters might try hiding bad news behind much bigger bad news. Look at Jo Moore, a top PR jockey who suggested the UK’s Labour government ‘bury bad news’ on September 11, 2001. She’s now retraining as a primary school teacher.
When it comes to releasing positive information, without a shadow of a doubt the best day is Saturday. Why? Because the Sunday and Monday press have much less news and often struggle to top up their editions. In the UK national press, Monday editions are rarely edited by the usual daily editor, but rather by whoever comes in on a Sunday as they work on a rota basis.
E-mail questions to Heather McGregor – [email protected]. McGregor is a former IRO and investment analyst who currently works on IR assignments for Taylor:Bennett, an executive search firm specializing in communications jobs
