Communicating with the media

Today our guest speaker was David Estok, editor-in-chief of The Hamilton Spectator. He has experience in both journalism and corporate communications, and therefore deeply appreciates the relationships organizations have with the media. He played this clip at the beginning of his presentation as a humourous way to illustrate how easily an organization can damage its reputation via the media. He used examples like Martha Stewart, Enron, and Air Canada to show how reputations established in the media have permanently tainted your opinion of them (not to say that they don't deserve this). He believes that organizations need to act quickly, decisively, and with full disclosure in order to confront negative news. Establish a solid professional reputation with the media, and always be informed when you interact with them. Public relations can play a key role in advertising your brand, however it cannot make up for bad decisions. (By the way, I think I was the only one out of seventy two students who had already seen the clip. My dad had forwarded it to me in an email because it definitely appeals to our sense of humour.)

Mr. Estok's visit ended what has been a very busy week. Our management science class has kept us busy, including a mid-term yesterday, and we have had a steady stream of guest speakers and lunchtime workshops. We also gave presentations today during our Communicating Effectively class. I have to admit, they were quite fun, as we were allowed to choose our own topic and make up supporting data. Our topic was "Centipedes: What you should know" with a bunch of fake scientific statistics to argue that we should eradicate all house centipedes. I know it sounds lame but we actually found it quite humourous as we made it up. The topic came up because our team member David gets a lot of them in his basement suite, and they really creep him out. A lot of the other presentations were hilarious and I think we all had a good time.

It's not going to get any easier soon. Next week we will cover several difficult cases for DMA (our management science course), plus we have reports and presentations due between now and June 23 when the module ends. I can already tell that some classmates are showing signs of fatigue, so I think we will all be exhausted when the next two weeks are over.