Back in January when I was planning to leave the UAE in March, I registered for the Fourth National Summit on Strategic Communications to be held in Washington D.C. April 22-23.
That was before I knew that the first people I would meet in Miami were Emiratis Jalal Luqman and Sumayyah Al Suwaidi. I wrote about Sumayyah’s show of beautiful evening gowns during Miami International Fashion Week in the April issue of Tempo.
A month later I learned that it’s impossible to avoid Abu Dhabi in the US when the organizer of the Summit emailed to tell me that representatives of the Abu Dhabi Municipality would be participating.
I didn’t recognize any of the names but decided these Emiratis would be the first people I talked to at the conference. On Monday, April 22, the approximately 80 participants met for the first time at 7:30 am for a networking breakfast.
Everyone was friendly, reading names from the large tags we were given as we arrived, and then I saw two ladies in abayas with several gentlemen in western suits and introduced myself as a former Abu Dhabi resident.
The Summit on Strategic Communications proved to be as interesting as I had hoped. Several American military commanders who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq spoke about the public relations dimension of their job – we learned that the men who make war and conduct counter insurgency operations cannot rely only on hardware in today’s global media environment. They must work to explain what is being done and why to the people most affected which means the population of the country and the region; it is not enough to deal with governments; explanatory messages and apologies if something has gone wrong have to be deployed through press conferences and interviews as well as social media.
When something unexpected and important happens, said one of the speakers, he has no more than 45 minutes to respond. If he doesn’t “take control of the story,” he explained, someone else will, and the story may become distorted or entirely wrong.
Such a story has a media life of about three days, and a response at that point is much less effective than immediate reaction within the first 45 minutes. If there is no reaction for longer, the story spirals out of control.
The speaker recalled that 40 days passed before the former BP CEO Tony Hayward apologized for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He was unable to repair the damage to BP’s reputation and lost his job soon after. The opportunity to respond immediately occurs only once and shouldn’t be missed.
The nine-member Abu Dhabi delegation participated enthusiastically in the discussions. Adel Hussain Al Rabeea who led the group asked a number of questions as did others in the delegation, and they all seemed completely engaged in the conference.
During one of the breaks on the second day, I asked Adel and Muhanad Al-Bender who works in the western region why they had come to the Summit. They said they wanted to learn more about how PR worked in other countries and were impressed by how the private sector and the military discussed their strategies of communication, first planning and then implementing.
The other point they mentioned was the importance of getting top leadership in an organization fully engaged in strategic communications – making it part of the “core business” of the organization.
Although several of the Abu Dhabi team had been in the US before, it was the first visit for Adel and Muhanad. Both said they were impressed by how “kind” Americans were and looked forward to two days in New York prior to the long flight back home.
Today at breakfast before they left for New York, I learned that Adel used to work at Emirates TV, now Abu Dhabi TV, and knows well Jalal Luqman and Sumayaah Al Suwaidi who worked there too.
By Alma Kadragic
