CorpComms Magazine

In Asia, where PR executives can easily pay for negative media coverage with their jobs, corporate communications is often about limiting the potential for damage and communicating as little as possible. Many so-called corporate communicators would probably be convicted under the Trades Descriptions Act were it to apply here.

The fallback of choice for jittery Asian corp comms executives, should a pesky journalist actually manage to track them down, is the written response. No matter how banal a journalist's inquiries may be, the person on the other end of the phone will almost always request that you put your questions in writing.

So long as you are only interested in confirming a few facts and figures, the chances are that you will get a helpful response. But, if you've dared to ask anything slightly more interesting, you've got no hope of receiving a useful reply.

One American corp comms veteran who works for a large financial company in Hong Kong defended the practice of email interviews, claiming it was nothing to do with avoiding hard questions and was about making the best use of his department's and his bosses' time. But, when I emailed him some questions the next day, he only replied to the factual ones, sending me back pages of statistics in the hope that I wouldn't realise he hadn't responded to anything even faintly controversial.

While there's much to be said for companies 'managing the message', this level of control only really succeeds in closing down communication with the media. Especially as email responses often arrive days after the initial request, long after the story has been put to bed.

share me: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Tweet