Are You Ready for the Most Obvious Questions in a Crisis?
October 20, 2006 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
We’ve all dealt with FAQs, but Steven Silvers has a great suggestion – develop MOQs for a spokesperson commenting on a crisis for your organization.
“[In] crisis situations, what matters most is how a company proactively addresses the ‘MOQs’ – those difficult but Most Obvious Questions about the negative event and its ramifications.”
The first instinct in a crisis is to hunker down and protect the company from criticism. That triggers journalists’ natural tendency to aggressively pursue news that is being hidden from the public.
Anticipating the negative questions and answering them before they’re asked puts your company out in front of the issues, derails rumours and speculation, and enhances your company’s credibility when you need it most, says Silvers, head of a Denver PR firm.
Image courtesy of Spell with Flickr.
Sounds like Edelman should taken a page from a smaller competitor on that one.
When I worked in government, we called them “Anticipated Questions”. A large whack of taxpayer funded public servants’ time was spent in providing plausible responses to tricky questions which might feasibly be asked of the minister. I got quite good at it, but it did not strike me then, nor does it now, as the most useful contribution I’ve ever made to humanity.