8 Advisor PR Lessons From This Year's Bank Meltdown

Banks made some major communication errors during the recent crisis affecting the sector, and advisors can learn from these mistakes, according to Rob Farmer, managing director and head of communications at The Rudin Group, a financial-services marketing strategy firm. In early March, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized Silicon Valley Bank after a run on deposits wiped out the company in the biggest U.S. bank failure in over a decade, sparking concerns that bank runs could spread. Some of those fears likely could have been prevented if more banks — including those with wealth management operations — had avoided some key communications missteps, Farmer told ThinkAdvisor during a recent interview. "I've worked in communications pretty much my whole life ever since moving over from being a reporter way back when and primarily in stock financial services communications and, in that role, have worked on a number of different crisis communications plans for banks and also for some insurance companies and even some sort of governmental agencies," Farmer said. He went on to list eight important lessons that advisors and advisory firms should take away from the banking crisis. Read about them in this gallery. (Gallery images: Chris Nicholls/ALM)