Good PR absent in SuperCat incident

As I began to write this, it is mid-morning of Monday, May 22. It is almost a full day since a SuperCat vessel from Ormoc got involved in a maritime incident mid-afternoon Sunday, May 21, near the Mandaue-Mactan Bridge some 30 minutes away from its destination at the Port of Cebu. This is the trip my family often takes, hence my personal interest.

But I have a professional interest in the incident as well, being still an active, though semi-retired journalist. My journalistic interest got piqued by the fact that nearly a full day has passed and I have yet to read or hear of a more comprehensive report or story of the incident than the broken and fragmented ones in both mainstream and social media.

This is very bad for all concerned and I think the main culprit in why the story is going every which way like a headless chicken is because the main party to the incident, SuperCat, failed to rein in the story with good PR It took quite a while after the incident happened for SuperCat to issue anything, if at all. This is a big no-no in the age of instant communication.

Early on in my career, long before cellphones made their way into the hands of people and made instant reporters of everybody, government and the private sector relied heavily on their own public relations teams to coordinate with media for information dissemination. In the private sector, among the best PR teams were those of San Miguel and PAL.

Both were often headed by former professional mediamen who fully understood the need to get their official versions out first. In other words it was imperative to get ahead of the story before the story get out of hand, which is what usually happens when you just leave bits and pieces of information flying around.

This was very important to both San Miguel and PAL as their businesses often not only involved public sensitivity but the potential to affect public health as well. Thus, whenever something happens involving a product or a service, you (we in media) can always expect San Miguel or PAL with an official statement within the soonest time from the incident.

This not only gives them the edge of their official version nipping in the bud any nasty speculation, media is now bound to quote their well-crafted words that will be much-kinder and legally-safe for the company. And it saves much work for the reporters. At any rate, the biggest thing for good PR is that a company retains some control over even a bad story.

This was not the case with SuperCat last Sunday. With SuperCat failing to immediately control the story, certain details of the incident have now gone public that even non-lawyers like me recognize as potentially costly for the company. For example, a lawyer passenger was quoted in news reports quoting a crewman as saying the vessel had steering issues.

That detail should have been reined in by good PR not that it be hidden but couched in words not too rough on the edges. To have that detail in the open in all its horrifying specificity is, to me, a magnet for claims galore. A fastcraft with steering issues is spooky business. It is an issue best left to forthcoming maritime investigations to discuss.

As a result of the PR fiasco allowing the story to get into the public domain through social media, there will now be a lot of leads mainstream media will be duty-bound to pursue, most of them I am sure not a happy cause for SuperCat. The steering issue alone opens it up and its crew to a lot of very tough questions.