There’s a new pastime that’s all the rage in drought stricken California. Outing celebrity green lawns. In terms of environmental activism, it’s not up there with strapping yourself to a decommissioned oil rig in the middle of the North Sea or risking life and limb to disrupt a Japanese whaling ship, but nonetheless, it’s doing a great job of heaping shame on those celebrities who seem to rate their green lawn as a higher priority than irrigation for crops, or even drinking water.

For those tasked with safeguarding a company’s reputation, we get used to rooting out those potential crisis situations buried somewhere deep within an organisation. But how often are those reputation manglers hiding in plain sight? For many a celeb in California, they appear unaware that their conspicuously green and verdant lawns are a reputational car crash in the waiting. For many companies the same principle applies, except of course it’s usually not a green lawn at issue.

What was once acceptable…
Perhaps it’s a tax arrangement that may be perfectly legal but under today’s intense public scrutiny has become questionable at best; or employment practices (zero hours any one?); or the sponsorship of a particular event or organisation that once made sense and now seems clichéd or unacceptable; or even the hobby your chief exec pursues.

You can get too close sometimes to a situation to realise a potential PR crisis in the making. Perhaps it’s worth stepping back for a moment and asking yourself, where’s your ‘green lawn’?

A head of communications I once knew found himself caught up in a major industry scandal with his firm at the eye of a media storm. His working day stretched out. He’d arrive late at home and be off early the next day, working weekends and, even when at home, he’d be fielding calls and emails.

According to him, his wife had identified a curious imbalance between his time at work and his visibility in the press: “The thing I find odd,” his wife told him, “is that you’re spending all the hours dealing with this crisis and yet all I ever see in the press is you saying ‘no comment’. What exactly are you doing at work?”

That’s the curious thing about a crisis. It can suck up the hours but quite often, in media relations anyway, it involves saying very little. Increasingly though, that approach has changed. The growth of social media and the way in which news – particularly bad news – freely surfs the waves, means control by way of a ‘no comment’ is virtually (and literally) impossible.

Speak up …and quickly
People nowadays not only prefer transparency and full disclosure – they demand it. If you’ve nothing to hide, why not take every opportunity to say exactly that. And if you have something to hide, you’d better come out and give your side of events pretty quickly because it will be out sooner or later.

And wouldn’t you prefer to be the one who manages that story?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be spending any less hours in the office managing a crisis, but at least your wife/husband/partner will be able to see and read a bit more from the fruits of your labour.