Today, Joseph Diorio is a VP of PR with Boyd Tamney Cross in Wayne, Pa. But 20 years ago, he was working as a communications specialist at IBM on the day a former employee drove
his Lincoln Mark III through the back door, emerged from the car carrying an Uzi and a sawed off shotgun, and proceeded to spray the hallways with bullets. Four employees died and
many more were wounded.
Diorio spoke with us about the PR effort in the wake of that event and about how crisis communications has changed – and stayed the same – over the last two decades.
PRN: What was the immediate PR response to the incident?
JD: All the communications professionals at IBM had been taught that the first step was to notify corporate PR. So when the gunman came into the building, myself, a coworker and
two secretaries ran into a law library. We locked the door and got underneath a table, and my coworker – talk about being focused! – taps me on the shoulder and says: "Joe, when we
get out of here, we have to notify corporate." Which I will confess was the last thing on my mind at the time.
PRN: And when the shooting was over, how did you handle communications?
JD: In the immediate aftermath in a case like this, police are your primary point of contact. So for the first 48 hours the police were the spokespeople. But by the following
Tuesday the focus had shifted [and IBM had to respond to media].
[On the employee front,] there was no email, so we had to put together packages for managers that let them know how to work out arrangements with people who wanted time off.
Additionally, IBM hired a psychologist to be on site, and it was up to PR to communicate to managers that he was there. PR also put together a Q&A set for managers, showing
them the types of questions we anticipated getting from the press, along with our responses.
PRN: How many people made this happen?
JD: We had four people on the on-site PR staff. There were another two people locally who worked in another IBM division, and there was a 15-person team in Armonk, N.Y. that was
backing us up.
PRN: What would you do differently if faced with the same situation today?
JD: Obviously today somebody would have had a cell phone strapped to their belt, and we would have email, so we could have kept in touch with corporate offices even as we were
locked in the library. Thanks to communications tools, it is also easier to get reporters in touch with the right person more quickly. When those initial calls came in to us, with
today's technology we could have seamlessly transferred them directly to the people in Armonk, instead of taking messages and promising return calls.
PRN: What about on the strategic side?
JD: In fact, I don't think it would have been a whole lot different. The strategy in crisis is always the same. Find out if the business can continue, and if it can, convey that
to your audiences. If it can't continue, convey to your audiences what is different. That does not change a whole lot.
At the same time, there is one big difference today. Twenty years ago there were 21 PR professionals working on this. I have not worked for IBM for some time, but I guarantee
you even IBM does not have a PR staff that big anymore.
So, you have to do a better job of crisis planning. [Other executives] think PR pros are being paranoid nuts when we talk about crisis planning, when we ask things like, "What
are we going to do if armed terrorists lay siege to the building?" But today you have to do that kind of planning, and you have to think of a lot of different contingencies.