If you read about the Diamond Pet Foods recall on the front page of the Jan. 2 issue of PR Week magazine, you’d walk away thinking the company did just about everything it could to deal with this crisis.<\/p>\n
Its crisis plan included:<\/p>\n
—A consumer alert and recall three days after a veterinarian in upstate New York alerted the company about treating three dogs with symptoms associated with liver disease. The dogs had eaten Diamond pet food. Seventy-six pets have died. <\/p>\n
—Updates on its website.<\/a> <\/p>\n —An onsite call center where calls were coming in at the rate of 1,500 a day. Even though many customers couldn’t get through, call center staffers say they returned every phone call. <\/p>\n —A news release issued December 22 that was picked up by major and local dailies, the Associated Press, ABC News and CNN’s website.<\/p>\n —Alerts to Diamonds’ distributors, who then contacted retailers.<\/p>\n An admirable job of managing a crisis? Hardly, says blogger BL Ochman in a post <\/a>on Monday. <\/p>\n BL says it’s absolutely inexcusable that Diamond’s website is not up to date because the problem has been known and getting worse since mid-December.<\/p>\n “The Diamond Pet Food website is not up to date and its servers seem to be overloaded, causing the site to go down regularly,” she writes. <\/p>\n Today, they finally offered an update<\/a>. <\/p>\n She also berates the company for not issuing a statement about the recall since December. Her suggestions: <\/p>\n —Apologize and assure the public that they’re on top of the problem<\/p>\n —Start a recall information blog<\/p>\n —Put its executives online to help consumers up to the minute<\/p>\n —Bring in veterinarians who can advise consumers whose dogs may have eaten the contaminated products<\/p>\n —Start a fund to cover the vet bills and death expenses of affected pets <\/p>\n If you’re the victim of a product recall, multi-million-dollar lawsuit, a nasty rumor that spreads through the Internet, or a major accident, crisis counselor Jonathan Bernstein says you must be ready for media interviews while also handling the crisis. When I interviewed him on “How to Keep the Media Wolves at Bay<\/a>,” a teleseminar we did a few years ago, he suggested that key spokespeople always be braced for nasty questions from reporters. One way is to create a list of the worst questions you can think of, then craft answers to those questions. The reason for using a key spokesperson is so the management team can devote precious time to managing the crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you read about the Diamond Pet Foods recall on the front page of the Jan. 2 issue of PR Week magazine, you’d walk away thinking the company did just about everything it could to deal with this crisis. Its crisis plan included: —A consumer alert and recall three days after a veterinarian in upstate\u2026 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","iawp_total_views":1,"wds_primary_category":606,"footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[168,13],"class_list":{"0":"post-25032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-public-relations","7":"tag-crisis-communications","8":"tag-press-releases","9":"entry"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Joan Stewart","author_link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/author\/jstewart\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40957,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25032\/revisions\/40957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}