Book Review: Crisis Communications

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book for review.

Although those of us in business don't necessarily like to think about it, having a PR strategy for crisis situations is becoming more and more necessary. Instead of a single author, this book pulls together 20 authors, all senior crisis communication consultants from IPREX, which is a worldwide network of international public relations agency (I had never heard of it before reading this book). By leveraging the presumably best consultants in each of the individual crisis areas, the book is a great reference tool for anyone in business.

I initially figured that the book would focus on large crisis situations, but there is useful advice on how to handle topics such as reorganization and restructuring, fraud, and negative press. Although I was expecting it to be more traditionally focused, the book spends a good amount of time exploring strategies around using the web as a PR vehicle and the new rules, risks, and rewards around it. Most of the chapters include real life examples and/or case studies that really bring home the points for each topic and I'm a big fan of that style of writing in business books. Furthermore, there are a large amount of templates that range from strategic planning tools, actionable checklists, and sample press release copy (the press release copy samples are extremely useful as opposed to Googling for samples that you hope are well-written).

Certainly worth having a copy on your shelf even if you don't read it cover-to-cover even if you, like me, hope you'll never need it.

Too bad it's not available yet in a Kindle edition.

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