Hi everyone, welcome to the A6&Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today we're talking about the tricky topic of crisis communications. And this episode actually builds on a previous podcast we did around the why, when, and how of PR or public relations for startups. Joining us here at the conversation again, we have Margaret Wenmockers, who heads up marketing at Anderson Horowitz and previously co-founded the Outcast agency. And we have Kim Milosevic, who is also at Outcast, is on the communications team here and was formerly at Skype.

In this episode, we're doing one of our hallway-style conversations because it's one of those topics that's seen through the outcomes only, but the process behind those outcomes matters a lot.

And while it may seem obvious to those of us who are in the inside, it's a bit of a black box for those who aren't familiar with crisis comms 101.

Both Margut and Kim are longtime veterans of PR and have observed and or participated in crises with companies of all shapes and sizes.

But since the first golden rule of crisis management is to never talk about what happened, we can't share specific examples, so instead we focus today, especially given recent news and political events, on the

nuances and mindsets behind getting through a crisis, from identifying one to fact discovery, to making

a statement, to what happens after. So Marget's a first voice you'll hear, and she kicks off the

conversation with the other golden rule of crisis management.

The golden principle is to never waste a crisis because something is happening at or to the company that's about for customers, employees, or whatever the case may be.

And then it's an opportunity to make the company better as a result.

Yeah.

There is the layer of what are the articles and what do they say today.

And but there's the deeper layer.

It's like, okay, so what is, what can we do to improve the company so that, hey, it doesn't

happen again and so that we come out better on the other side.

And I think people think of a crisis often as a press thing versus a business thing. And they're both. Oftentimes,

when companies think they may have a quote unquote crisis, it is more of an internal situation

that needs to be handled. Of course, you always have to think about how you'd handle the situation

should it become public. But it's many times all the things that you have to do before it becomes

public. What got you in that situation in the first place, right? Yeah. Definitely want to think about that.

And in addition to think about, well, if we get sued and goes public, what do we say? So what you guys are

saying is it's not just something you kind of make go away. Also, so that's kind of hard to do, make stuff go away. Right. There's media and

...