You can lose control of the story in minutes

Celebrity keynote speaker just said something outrageous? Activists staging a protest outside your exhibition? In less frenetic times, you’d probably have an hour before the newspapers started calling. Now, you can guarantee it’ll be ‘all over socials’ within minutes. If not seconds. So it's rather alarming that the vast majority (80 per cent) of companies working in the events industry don’t have a ‘proper plan’ in place for when things go spectacularly wrong. That’s according to communications experts Chris Lewis and Dominic Keogh who say most event planners and venues still treat crisis management as a tick-box exercise.