DIY Public Relations is often DOA

After spending nearly a quarter century in journalism, you might imagine I’ve dealt with a few public relations flaks along the way. Some were admittedly excellent, while others were about as helpful as a blowout in the Holland Tunnel.

But they were all often a necessary gateway to capturing a sit down with C-suite executives. So whether good or bad, you navigated through them as best you could.

When an unforeseen event happened - especially when it was a PR nightmare - they were the first line of defense, cobbling together a company statement for the throngs of inquisitors from the Fourth Estate.

But I was always of the belief that there were limits on what issues an internal public relations team should address on their own.

As an example, when Former Big Five firm Arthur Andersen was imploding under the Enron scandal, I felt that the first thing the company should have done immediately was hire a renowned crisis management consultant, experienced in handling such matters and diffusing the situation. Instead, they attempted to handle the matter in-house with disastrous results.

Now probably the only thing recent accounting graduates know about Andersen is what is written in their textbooks.

But that was then and this is now.

Arguably the most popular topic popping up in an online search this week is United Air Lines and the graphic pictures of a bloodied passenger being forcibly carried off an overbooked flight at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.

Now in full disclosure, United is a carrier that I have gone to great lengths to avoid – often at high personal cost to myself in terms of money and convenience. And I’m not going out too far on a limb when I say the airline did absolutely nothing this past week to burnish its famous ad slogan “fly the friendly skies,” a tagline it has used since 1965.

But compounding the situation was its CEO, Oscar Munoz, who, ironically, just weeks earlier was named “Communicator of the Year” by PR Week magazine, who said the unfortunate passenger had to be “re-accommodated.”

Let me repeat that for emphasis – re-accommodated.

Now my question is what PR team in this universe would allow something like that to occur without a full dress rehearsal first? United Continental is not a small retailer or accounting firm – rather it’s a global titan of industry with an aggregate fleet of 740 planes. So I will assume their in-house and outside PR agencies are not staffed with newly minted college graduates cutting their teeth.

I estimate it will be a while before UAL emerges from this incident, to say nothing of the countless flight cancellations if for no other reason than solidarity.

I could join legions of others playing Monday morning quarterback and opining on what United should have done, but I’ve seen it many times before.

Don’t try this at home.