More JetBlue Blues and some good advice from Strive

The past few days I’ve been thinking about the mini-blogstorm that erupted toward the end of last week about some comments made by JetBlue’s Director of Communications Jenny Dervin. Interviewed in PR Week, she seemed to imply that advice and comments on how to handle the PR around the Valentine’s Day disaster were not at all welcome by JetBlue CorpComm. In later comments, she clarified that it was "ambulance chasers" looking for the JetBlue business that were not welcome. Sincere comments and advice were valuable; she just didn’t appreciate people pitching the business while she was in the midst of a crisis.

Putting myself in her shoes, I definitely understand the reaction. Trying to do the best one can in the midst of a serious crisis, you don’t want to hear — even remotely — from people implying that they could do it better. Or looking for your job. That doesn’t mean you don’t want advice, or that you ignore well meaning advice because it’s NIH. And the advice I read in many blogs, from many folks that I greatly respect, was in no way "ambulance chasing." Which I am sure Ms. Dervin realizes.

But she didn’t say it very well. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about. As communicators, we have to guard against becoming the story. It is our clients, our companies that should be the story, not us. In this age of constant and relatively shameless, and necessary, self promotion, this is hard. But imperative.

When how we do our jobs, or who we are,  becomes more important than the result we achieve for a client or our company, we’ve failed the client, the company.

Now, I certainly don’t think that Ms. Dervin has failed her company. She and her team have done a good job dealing with a real mess. However, I do know that personally, should something similar ever happen to me in future, I’ll be very careful to not become the story myself.

Shifting gears, Sherrilynne Starkie has some great advice about writing leads. Check it out.

And of course, don’t miss Battlestar Galactica, SciFi Channel, Sunday 10pm EST.

Tags: JetBlue, PR, public relations