Rick Clements headed the public affairs department of Singapore Airlines for 13 years, having previously worked for 11 years in the airline’s IT division. He was responsible for managing most areas of corporate communication, including media relations, issues management and corporate reputation management.

During his tenure, he grew the airline’s public affairs resources from a single department to an international network of public relations professionals in more than a dozen countries, supported by teams of public affairs and public relations consultants.

He was chief spokesman following two major airline accidents, the first in December 1997 when a SilkAir  (SIA’s regional subsidiary) flight went down in a river near Palembang, Indonesia; and the second in October 2000, when an SIA aircraft crashed on take-off in Taipei. He also spearheaded SIA’s public relations campaigns to restore public confidence in air travel following a worldwide fall in demand after 9-11 attacks and again during the SARS crisis.

He left Singapore Airlines in 2004 to set up his own consultancy and has been a speaker at numerous conferences and forums in the aviation, hospitality and healthcare industries, among others.

Synopsis
For decades, the role of  corporate communications has been to control damage and protect the organization’s reputation if a crisis happens, and the basic principles of crisis communication have barely changed during that time.   But today, the growth of social media has changed the way crises are reported and made it almost impossible for the corporate communications team to stay ahead of the curve by telling its own story before rumours and misinformation can fill the void.  In today’s world, news of a crisis can spread around the world even before the organization concerned can begin drafting a statement.   As social media evolves, the crisis communication plan must evolve with it, and corporate communicators now need to learn and master new skills to control damage.