Vancouver-based Mat Wilcox announced earlier this month she would dissolve the city’s fourth largest PR company at the end of August. But, that doesn’t mean the Wilcox Group owner and crisis management expert will fade into the sunset or take a year off to find herself.
She will become a private consultant with a specialty in social media – an area she has been following closely.
The 25-year public relations veteran decided not to sell her 15-year-old agency because she did not want to be shackled with a non-compete clause. Besides, the buy-out offers she received were not for phenomenal sums, she said.
Wilcox said: “I started to notice about 18 months ago how social media and the whole crisis management field is changing. Things have radically shifted with technology.
“Back when there was the listeriosis crisis, there were 20 tweets an hour. You move up to the US Airways crash on the Hudson River and there were 50 tweets an hour. Then, it’s gone radically from there. The Tiger [Woods press conference] announcement had 50,000 tweets an hour.”
As she spoke, Wilcox was standing outside in downtown Toronto after being evacuated from her hotel after the June 24 earthquake.
Little news could yet be found in traditional media on the quake but there were plenty of tweets on Twitter.
She believes traditional media will continue to play a key role in communicating information to the public partly because of its reputation for reliability.