From the Orlando Business Journal by Abraham Aboraya

March 9, 2012

Roy W. Reid, Jr., APR, CPRC, is an award-winning strategic business and public relations expert and the author/creator of Outrageous Trust^®, a program to help leaders and organizations improve relationships through a more intentional effort in building trust.

Crisis: A public relations nightmare.

Worst-case scenario: The Tonight Show host Jay Leno talks about a customer finding a finger in your restaurant’s chili.

Local examples: NCAA investigations at the University of Central Florida due to alleged rule violations last year; and the death of SeaWorld Orlando trainer Dawn Brancheau, killed by orca Tilikum during a show in 2010.

What to do: Two things are key: You can’t control the crisis, but you can control the communication. “The events are always out of your control, but what you say, how you say it and when you say it is always in your hands,” said Roy Reid Jr., partner at Consensus Communications , which does about 25 percent crisis management work.

• One big rule: Honesty is like cleanliness. It’s next to godliness. So be honest, even if it’s to say we can’t talk about this incident or we don’t yet know what happened.

• Communicate from the inside out. Figure out who you need to speak to — the community, employees, customers, vendors, the media — and prioritize.

• Agree on a message and stay on it. Speculation can lead to fear of the unknown, so again: Keep on message.