How to navigate PR in the middle of a pandemic

With Coronavirus running wild in the world, the U.S. is grappling with an unprecedented crisis. From Main Street to Wall Street, businesses and the economy have been decimated. Meanwhile, the deadly virus takes thousands of lives daily. People are anxious and scared for their jobs, livelihood, families and health.

In an earlier blog post about how companies can help stakeholders, we noted that ‘business as usual’ has never been more unusual. Companies must now operate in uncharted territory. Sales and Marketing functions have to carefully balance how they serve, sell and communicate with their constituents. The public relations function must also maneuver ever so cautiously. So how and when do public relations make sense in these turbulent times? 

Here’s some recommended “PR do’s and don’ts” based on feedback and observations that we’d like to share with you. 

Don’ts

• Hold on pitching. Right now is not the time. People are dying. The majority of news falls into two categories: coronavirus/covid-19 and the economy/jobs. Unless your company has a bonafide product, service or donation that directly helps with this public health crisis, don’t waste the media’s time or your clients’ budgets. One avenue however that is fair game for public relations reps is to monitor and respond rapidly to appropriate open calls from reporters seeking help.
  

• Don’t be tone-deaf. Hold on pitching all products and services that cater to the uber elite or promote useless products given our current crisis. Millions of people are out of work or furloughed. Their chief concern is how they are going to feed their families or pay rent. Hawking non-essential crap like pricey designer sneakers, colorful slippers, or fancy getaways for the uber-wealthy is terrible timing and frankly unconscionable. We can’t emphasize enough to avoid being tone-deaf.
  

• Stop irrelevant newsjacking. Refrain from trying to weave your clients’ products or services loosely into the coronavirus crisis. Save the doozy pitches, like some of these real-world examples of “weight loss strategies during the pandemic,” “planning for your future funeral and death due to Covid-19,” or the coolest latex thongs that cost several hundred dollars. This bad PR will and should result in public shaming.
  

• Don’t harness the pandemic with flowery introductory pitches. Refrain from using the coronavirus pandemic in your opening salutations altogether. Check out Twitter to see a growing chorus of reporters expressing their annoyance with pitches that include introductory lines like “in today’s times of uncertainty...blah, blah, blah...”
  

• Don’t exploit the crisis. Organic traffic has plummeted across most industry verticals and for a good reason; people aren’t buying stuff because they can’t. It is an insensitive time to be hawking products and services via Facebook ads or Google Ads. There are still many questionable vendors pushing online ads selling overpriced masks and other personal protection equipment. If you find these ads unsavory, then be extra sensitive to the type and timing of your planned ad campaigns.
  
  

Do’s

• Talk to your clients about the gravity of the pandemic. Explain to them that now is not the time to be pitching. Over the next 2-4 months, the U.S. will continue to experience an alarming number of deaths from the deadly virus. Even when the U.S. partially reopens for business, our public health will be at risk until we have a vaccine, which most experts say will not be for 16 to 18 months.
  

• Create a crisis communications plan for how to talk and engage key stakeholders. Team up with experts who can help you create your crisis communications plan that includes the right set of listening tools, with a proactive approach that gets company and internal teams focused on being ready and adapting to this unprecedented disruption.
  

• Reexamine and overhaul planning calendars for both content marketing and social media. Carefully review all content that you’ve planned and recalibrate your company communications to focus on key stakeholders during this immediate crisis and extend the planning throughout this year and into next year.
  

• Go back to the drawing board to put new programs in place that have longer lead times,  such as speaking opportunities and awards programs (6-12 month lead times), video content series, white paper development, meaningful surveys, etc.
  

• Carefully consider whether your news is relevant. Media are still covering funding announcements, but keep in mind that the funding amounts need to be significant. The media are always going to cover required business news such as mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, and earnings that are now underway. Major vendors such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon are the exceptions for announcing new products and services. Prominent brands are also successfully currently announcing valuable cause-related donations and initiatives to help address the pandemic. Significant cause-related initiatives are one area that startups and SMBs could take, such as a joint partnership, fundraising or unique donation effort to help frontline workers, people out of a job, or local businesses in need.
  

• Plan and build long-lead initiatives. Focus on developing case studies. Now is the perfect time to get several drafts underway, interviewing customers and writing up draft case studies for review and editing. For fast-moving startups and companies, an analyst campaign now makes a lot of sense. It requires a lot of heavy lifting and the efforts pay off in the longer lead reports they are planning to develop. The reality is that either industry analysts know about you, or you are off their radar and your competitors are engaging with them.