Blast from the Past | Exploring Intricacies in Crisis Communication Through Social Media | PRCA Training

Exploring Intricacies in Crisis Communication Through Social Media | PRCA Training

If you’re new to Public Relations, you should learn about the world’s largest Professional PR body, the Public Relations and Communications Association. PRCA aims to raise standards in the PR and Communications industry by sharing industry data, information, and best practices, as well as creating networking opportunities. They represent consultancies around the world, including hundreds of individual and freelance PR and communication practitioners. 

Orchan is associated with PRCA’s regional headquarters in Singapore, through which Orchan’s Director, Dr Craig J Selby, ran sessions for them as part of their professional development and outreach initiatives to help their members gain exposure to areas of the industry that they may not normally be involved in at work.

The first session Craig facilitated for PRCA was a full day session on “Social Media Crisis Communication”. The session was a professional development workshop for PRCA members who wanted to explore the intricacies of Crisis Communication using social media as the driving platform. During the talk by Craig, the participants were able to explore how crises unfold, how to prepare and plan for potential crises, how to react in a crisis, and most importantly, how to advise clients in terms of response during a crisis. 

The second session was a shorter discussion entitled “Beyond Current Crisis”, held during the early period of Covid lockdown in April 2020. The session was about looking at Business Continuity within the changing landscape of Covid. Held when Covid was relatively new, Craig and participants explored how to realign brand communications for community tone and shared experience, and what the role of the Agency would become in this pandemic. The most important question that was discussed was “How to keep our Agencies relevant during this time of uncertainty / what are our new roles and norms".

Craig shared his experience facilitating the talk; “The first training was a webinar on Day One of the Malaysian lockdown (Singapore / Malaysia border closed that day). It was the first corporate online / webinar training that I had offered. Good experience, but steep learning curve. It's fun teaching to people in a room; its different training thumbnails online.”

He also mentioned that training industry professionals means you can go several levels deeper in analysis and share current happenings more. Trainers can learn a lot from their experiences and client scenarios too - a great session means the person facilitating the training walks away having learnt as much as the participants have.