Intérêt Europe

It has been hard to live in Greece since the last five days without having heard of Julia and the hot scenes that emerged from nowhere produced by Sirina Entertainment.

Now, the question that I want to pose – and which I believe is actually more relevant than one might initially think – is what learnings can we take from her handling of this case, i.e. what if anything could we learn from Julia that could be applied to politicians or businessmen. These learnings are mainly found in her way of managing media and handling crisis communications. There could be other learnings too, but those can be too personal in nature and they are not in the area of interest of my notes here. If you read Greek, Stefanos has a good summary of some wider political implications in his pestaola.gr blog.

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If Julia’s objective was to maximise the media attention, create more buzz and stories, then she has done brilliantly. The cynical me thinks that it indeed was and remains her objective. The whole dvd-project being fully accidental seems too unlikely, particularly given her background in scantily clad pictures. She may not be a rocket scientist, but for sure she knows how to make media eat from her hands.

I have written earlier about the cost of crisis in this blog and about the way that negative stories can be killed (or at least minimised).  Julia Alexandratou has broken almost every single rule of crisis management and communications in the last days. Whether or not this is intentional is another matter. For the learnings that we want to draw from it, the motive doesn’t make a difference.

Let’s have a look one by one.

Tell the truth. Based on everything that I’ve read, Julia’s been lying about her partner, contract, production of the film, her relations with the adult cinema industry as well as her financial arrangements with Sirina. The more you hide, the more you avoid the tough questions, the more the journalists will dig into the case.

Act swiftly to correct the situation. Julia had months to fix it all before the dvd came out. This dvd wasn’t filmed last week. She could have taken any precaution, negotiated and planned communications, if she didn’t want the whole case out in public. Instead, she did nothing, panicked and denied everything.

Communicate what you do and intend to do. The only thing Julia has done is to say that she will press charges against the production company. This is not a very credible defense when one has been found knickers down lying on a bed right in the act under blasting professional lights in front of at least two cameras.

Engage and let friends talk for you. This would be good, if the friends and spokespersons found by media would have something more positive to say than how much Julia netted from the dvd.

Rebuild trust and transparency. In Julia’s case this includes apologising the concert going audience for the ordeal and dressing up in transparent clothing. In real life this should be more about doing the right thing and accepting one’s mistakes. Lipservice is not enough – trust can be lost quickly, but it isn’t built back overnight.

So, what’s the lesson for politicians or businessmen? Surely it is that one needs to plan forward. Hypothetically, in case that this really was an accident, Julia didn’t realise that the pending release of her dvd could be the highest reputational risk for her future career plans. She should have been prepared, she should have had a group of friends giving support.  Second learning is that she should have appeared honest and determined to fix this mess.

Politicians and businessmen have a lot less margin for error than entertainers. Personal reputation and trust can sometimes be a crucially important asset. Not only for the individual but also for the organisation that he or she represents. Julia has done a great service to the Greek crisis management community. She has offered a yet another example of how not to do crisis communications. However, I have little doubt that the next case will repeat all these mistakes again – that time, though, the mistakes are more likely to be non-intentional.