You Can’t Blame PR for Everything

Whenever a major corporation suffers any type of issue with their product or service, it’s amazing to see how many so called “experts” come out of the woodwork to quickly label the issue as a PR disaster. Our industry is similar to that of professional referees in that when our jobs are done right nobody notices, but we’re the first ones to blame when anything goes awry.

Let’s be completely clear: the conditions that passengers faced on the Carnival Cruise Triumph were terrible. While nothing is certain, a customer who pays for a service deserves compensation if circumstances cause the quality of service to be the complete opposite of what they expect. That’s the bridge of trust that every customer has with the companies that they do business with, and when the customer upholds their end of the relationship by paying for the service, it’s incumbent upon the company to reciprocate by delivering what they promise. 

But sometimes accidents happen. The need to laser focus blame often trumps the fact that we live in a world of intangibles. Bridges collapse, planes crash, buildings catch fire and, yes, cruise ships have accidents that render them dead in the water.

But that’s not the fault of PR professionals, yet we are the easiest target. I’m not an engineer, nor a maritime expert, but it seems like in the year 2013 when I can watch live video on my phone of a robot on another planet, the fact that a vessel the size of a small town, with all of the technological sophistication available to it, is rendered completely useless when a fire occurs in the engine room seems baffling to me.

The issue of lack of communication as a result of this mechanical (repeat: mechanical) breakdown on the part of Carnival is both manufactured and false.  

As Catherine New from the Huffington Post points out:

Carnival also was slow to communicate with the press or provide detailed information to passengers about the status of the breakdown and the rescue, raising questions about how well the company and industry at large are prepared to deal with ship breakdowns at sea — both operationally, and from a communications perspective.

It’s great to have that level of speculation into the operations of a company and its services. It’s also baseless. What is the standard for “slow”? And what are the questions about Carnival’s ability to prepare and deal with breakdowns at sea? When did we start asking about the questions that should be asked instead of asking the questions themselves in order to get facts? It’s also easy to point to social media as the bellwether for both when and how a company should respond to what is determined by the media to be a crisis. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, along with 24-hour news stations are an insatiable beast that are often fed by misinformation, speculation and arbitrary timeframes as to when and how a company should respond to any issue that arises with its ability to provide the service it promises.  

Who’s really responsible for a crisis when the media reads tweets or Facebook posts from those not directly affected by a company’s actions and presents them as credible sources to validate the idea that a PR crisis has occurred?

PR, when done right, builds companies through communications that build the value of their brands and provide audiences with the information most relevant to them. PR also protects companies when a crisis of communications (repeat: communications) occurs. But accidents cannot be eradicated, and the only way the Triumph breakdown can be considered a PR crisis is if it is ever revealed that the company knowingly put the lives of its passengers at risk through unsafe business or maintenance practices. Since there are still seats available on the speculation train, I’ll jump on board and say malicious practices were not the cause of the accident.

By all accounts the crew on the ship – the direct ambassadors between Carnival and the passengers – acted heroically to do whatever was necessary to keep passengers calm and their needs met. In the face of an accident or intangible situation, that’s the most important thing a company can do.

So don’t declare poor PR because Carnival’s executives didn’t respond to every tweet or give public statements to coincide with a show or media outlet that struggles for relevance. Flashy headlines and speculation make for interesting conversation, but not in the arena of accuracy.

There will always be a need to assign blame to every situation where people suffer – it’s human nature not to accept that some things happen purely by accident. That is the unfortunate reality of today’s communications landscape.  But when problems arise, we only can resolve them by focusing on solutions to ensure they don’t happen again, rather than manufacture a flaw in how companies communicate during a crisis.