O'Leary, call us in

Dear Sonny, and readers,

We can shake hands! What a pleasure to read your blog and see that there are more people like me who want to make clear that O'Leary has a totally wrong approach when it comes to protecting Ryanair's reputation during a crisis. We agree that O'Leary as CEO, with his remarkable communication, has created bad publicity for himself, but also for Ryanair, since the image of the CEO and organization are linked (Denner, Heitzeler and Koch, 2018). I want to highlight some points to make clear why O’Leary should get some crisis communication lessons to make sure he, and Ryanair, will not be seen even more as the black sheep of the airplane-family.

 

Copyright: theinnovationdiaries.com

               

Choose an appropriate spokesperson
Let's start at the beginning. Ryanair should never have appointed O'Leary as a spokesperson. A spokesperson is preferably not the CEO or director of the organization (Bernstein, 2004). This spokesperson often has enough other things to do and cannot also take care of communication with stakeholders. Each crisis communication team must have a spokesperson who has been pre-screened and trained to be both the lead and backup spokesperson for different channels of communication. Thus, the spokesperson should have had several media training courses before he can really come out because practice makes perfect. I wonder how many training courses our Ryanair spokesperson has had...

Use Twitter

Another point for which I would like to give you a high-five for is ‘responding quickly to a crisis as an organisation’. Referring to the research by Sung and Hwang (2014), the use of social media during a crisis is of great importance. Twitter will provide better monitoring of the problem and show more commitment from the organization. Here too, O'Leary is missing out on opportunities...there are no reactions on Twitter from his side. The quick reaction by an organization before another party does it to avoid such a bad reputation is called stealing thunder. As you pointed out, this brings benefits; you can read all about it in one of my previous blogs.

Be sympathetic
You also indicate that O'Leary is hostile towards stakeholders; he accuses the staff of rival airlines and unions of conspiracy against Ryanair. This hostility arouses little sympathy with the stakeholders. O'Leary is more concerned with biting himself off than actually showing his sympathy to those who really matter in this crisis. No smart strategy Mr. CEO! Make sure you show sympathy, choose a 'warm' tone of voice and communicate from the perspective of the victims (Verhoeven et al., 2014).

 

It all sounds so easy; choose a spokesperson, use some Twitter, and be sympathetic. But why is it so hard for O’Leary to handle this crisis? Sonny, and I only read the literature and I find ourselves already considerable crisis communication professionals. Thus O'Leary, you just have to read a bit more literature or call us in.

#O’Leary #crisiscommunication #spokesperson #Twitter #sympathetic

The author
Vivienne Raijmakers, 26 years old, is a MSc Corporate Communication student at the University of Amsterdam. Did an internship at Edelman PR, so indeed passionate about PR and especially the field of crisis communication.

References

Bernstein, J. (2004). The 10 steps of crisis communications. Crisis Response, prevention, planning and, Training, 106.

Denner, N., Heitzler, N., & Koch, T. (2018). Presentation of CEOs in the media: A framing analysis. European Journal of Communication, 33(3), 271-289.

Sung, M., & Hwang, J. S. (2014). Who drives a crisis? The diffusion of an issue through social networks. Computers in Human Behavior, 36, 246-257.

Verhoeven, P., Tench, R., Zerfass, A., Moreno, A., & Verčič, D. (2014). Crisis? What crisis?: How European professionals handle crises and crisis communication. Public Relations Review, 40(1), 107-109.