Listen and learn: Martin Wilmott on Photography as a Businesss

I came across Martin's blog this morning and was so impressed by his audio tips in the blog post below that I had to blog about it myself. The key point he makes in his audio slideshow is that business is business: it doesn't matter if you're trying to make a living as a photographer or as a shoemaker. Check it out - it's marvellous that he's provided the synopsis free.

Martin Wilmott Photography: Photography as a Business

How not to handle a crisis - the Menu Foods recall and Petcetera

Storkvane, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley

For a variety of reasons, I've been following the Menu Foods Income Fund pet food recall story with keen interest.

• I remember receiving a fairly frantic phone call from my parents many years ago at the time of the Tylenol recall. I had been travelling on business to Chicago every month for almost a year, and when my parents heard the story on the news they immediately called to make sure I hadn't bought any while in Chicago.

• My own cat died just over two years ago from kidney failure, and his death was preceded by agonizing decisions on my part concerning what tests I should subject him to, how effective the tests would be in determining the cause of his problems, and how far one should be willing to go to prolong an animal's life. Blood tests? Ultrasound? Exploratory surgery? As with any loved one, you have to try to balance quality of life and torture you're about to inflict or allow others to inflict with your desire to keep a person or a creature you love alive.

• I've 'worked' a few crises as a corporate communications practitioner.

Menu Foods Income Fund would seem to have started out well in terms of dealing with the crisis when it was discovered animals that had eaten its wet and semi-moist private label cat and dog foods were suffering from kidney failure. My heart went out to the Toronto woman I saw on the news who had already spent $6000 on vet bills for her cat, only to be told that he would die in less than a year anyway. The recall by Menu Foods was comprehensive, the creation of a toll-free line and a recall web site was swift, and frequent updates have been issued.

So I was shocked to see a Petcetera vice president on CTV news last night saying that he had heard about the recall from the reporter rather than from anyone at Menu Foods. How is this possible?

I have no way of knowing whether Menu Foods is using a public relations firm to help with its crisis communications. I certainly hope they are, because crises are stressful for all concerned. I can't imagine that if it were using the firm I used to work for that a major stakeholder group - its retailers - would have been overlooked, as seems to be the case.

And so, while it's good to see that the company has stepped up to the plate in some ways, it reinforces the need for crisis communications planning. This crisis involves the whole company, and personnel should have been pulled from sales, marketing, customer service, accounting, shipping, human resources, you name it - each and every department it has - to ensure a major stakeholder group (and the single most important link in the supply chain at this point) had been contacted.

The time to plan for a crisis is not while you're in the middle of it. It's too late to put together the list of phone and fax numbers and email addresses for all your suppliers, customers, industry associations, government officials and other stakeholders after the crisis has happened. Like it or not, some people don't watch or read the news. Some people make a point of tuning out while they're on vacation - even die-hard news junkies. I remember coming back to Toronto from a week-long workshop in North Bay after having studiously avoided listening to the radio, watching television or reading the paper for eight or nine days. As we got off the 401 at the Dufferin exit and headed south, there were hundreds of people waving Italian flags. I thought Italy had invaded Canada. But it was just a World Cup Soccer win.

I've just done a preliminary check of the blogosphere and see that this crisis isn't affecting just Menu Foods' reputation. The fact that Petcetera was slow (for whatever reason) to get the products off its shelves is going to affect its reputation as well.

http://www.empressoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/

For another take on how Menu Foods has handled this crisis from communications perspective (and a comparison of how GoDaddy.com did), see this post from Thalsar Ventures:

http://thalasar.com/archives/crisis_manageme.html