Managing PR crisis requires right data, truthfulness —Edosomwan

Charles Edosomwan is the Founder and CEO, Teksight Edge PR. In this interview with Akin Adewakun, he explains the partnership between his agency and London School of Public Relations (LSPR); PR as a crisis management tool and other industry issues.

WHAT exactly is the partnership between your company, Teksight Edge, and the London School of Public Relations (LSPR) about?

I went to the London School of Public Relations (LSPR), about eight years ago, when I was about to start Teksight PR agency, and by the time I came back to Nigeria, I realised that we weren’t having a lot of  serious PR training. One of the shockers we had was that most Nigerian businesses were not even giving out PR briefs. We were only having advertising briefs or digital marketing briefs as the case may be. So, what we did was to start encouraging people about PR and encouraging people to take courses around PR, and that was what led to our partnership with LSPR. It is meant to bring that quality training to Nigeria. But we are not just bringing quality training to Nigeria or bringing people to come and train Nigerians, we are also trying as much as possible to develop local faculty here so that Nigerians would be the ones taking the training after a while.

Does that mean your company combines PR practice with training?

Yes. I practise PR, and my company Teksight  Edge is a PR agency, though with a slight difference from others. One such difference is that we use data to develop our PR strategies.  What this simply means is that we use technology and data to give brand an edge or advantage. Our strategy has always been based on data and information. Though the world is just waking up to the value of data, we had, however, seen that eight years ago. We had seen that the world was heading toward a data-driven economy. And now we are in the digital economy and we know the currency of the digital economy is data and that is why it is becoming more relevant now to get people trained, not just in PR, but also in other skills like data analysis, personal branding and others.

The 2023 general elections are around the corner; what would you recommend as the role of PR as the nation prepares for this significant event?

First, we need to train a load of our practitioners.  We are having a whole lot of PR issues in Nigeria, and what we are seeing is people trying to solve them with press releases. But at yesterday’s training, while discussing crisis management, there was an example of a hotel that had a bad review and the strategy used for addressing that was a core PR. There was no press releases or billboard or radio interview done to solve that problem for the hotel, but the problem was solved basically, using a completely different PR strategy. We understand that PR is based on certain strategies and rules and not just press releases at every point in time, or the use of influencers.  There are well-thought-out strategies around PR. There is therefore the need to enlighten our political candidates. One of the first things they should know is crisis management. They should know that we need to tell it early, tell it all or tell it ourselves. But in most cases, people find it difficult to tell early, tell it all or tell it themselves. So that is when you realise that there is a disconnect between how it is supposed to be practised and how it’s being  practised.  The only way to change anything is to have good knowledge about it, good information about it and that is the bedrock of training.

Since when has your agency been doing this training?

We are just starting. This is the first training in Nigeria, but the school has been existing for about 30 years.

Any plans to reach out to other PR practitioners on the need to avail themselves of this training your agency is offering?

Yes, we have our plans. Our first strategy is stakeholders’ engagement as a very strong PR tool or PR direction. Stakeholder engagement is something we don’t use these days, but it is very important and stakeholder engagement is why we needed you (the media) to be here. You can’t talk about PR without media. Besides, we also have practitioners and our clients here, too.

How helpful is data in  dealing with the issue of putting out the truth, especially in this era of propaganda?

There is something called the truth and there is something called design narrative. Yes, you must know the truth.  For example, a man shoots another person. You can call it murder. But you can realign the narrative. It can either be murder or self-defense and whatever you go with will determine the outcome of that process. Once you look at data, you will always find a suitable narrative to help you come up with a set of data unless your company has not been collecting the right set of data over time. Data don’t lie, but we need to have a good PR professional to help you navigate and know the data you need to put out there.

Any plans to involve NIPR in all this?

Yes. Actually, the first move we made was to contact the NIPR and the Nigeria Institute of Journalism (NIJ).  We have reached out to every stakeholder concerned. We also realise that NIPR has their own training, and there is a reason to bring Nigerian trainers from these institutes. For us, collaboration, partnership and engagement of stakeholders are really important.

We will engage everyone, the most important thing is to look for partners that would help you grow.

How would you assess the industry’s reactions to this training?

It’s been encouraging. We did a free training yesterday and we had about 89 people and I think that is the largest PR gathering of training in recent times, and the largest gathering of PR professionals and people who care about PR to see new perspectives on things. For instance, for many, managing a PR crisis is about lying or hiding the truth, but the right PR strategist will let you know that telling the truth and having the right data is the best strategy for you.