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A business’s reputation can be fragile and precious. Once a brand is soiled, it can take a long time to recover. This is true for international giants as much as it is for self-employed sole traders. A full-blown PR crisis might sound impossible now. However, you should always have a strategy just in case one hits. In the wake of a scandal, a business owner needs to act fast in order to save the reputation of their brand. Here, I’ve put together some of the best tips for carrying your company through a PR crisis.
You probably have great public relations at the moment. However, there are still some precautionary steps you should be taking, to make sure you aren’t caught with your pants down. You may want to start building a better relationship with various journals linked to your industry. This can be done by pitching articles about your business, or using press release distribution services. Having friends in the press can be extremely helpful when disaster strikes. If you’ve never had to experience a crisis before, then start thinking of a few different scenarios your company could be caught up in. Focus on the most likely and damaging of these situations, and draft a detailed plan for tackling each one. All of these plans should involve the crisis management resources you have. Assign different tasks to different employees, and set time limits on anything which will need to be done.
My next tip is to test these PR procedures regularly, and make sure they’re clear enough for your whole workforce. Every company should have a detailed crisis management handbook. This will contain internal and external communication structures and emergency contacts. Business continuity procedures are also pretty common in these documents. Even if the business is small, this crisis management handbook can easily end up being a hundred pages long. This is a little concerning when you consider that the first time most people pick up a document is when a crisis hits! Instead of pages and pages of text, make your crisis management handbook more readable. Use templates and checklists pertaining to different crisis scenarios. This will ensure that your management stays flexible and fast-acting when it needs to be.
If and when a crisis hits, make sure someone’s monitoring the media 24/7 for developments. You should have a pretty active social media presence anyway. However, during a PR crisis, it’s exceedingly important. Back in the good old days, a crisis would hit, and companies would have a “golden hour” to act before the press was at their door. With social media being so significant these days, that response time has dropped from an hour to a minute! Twitter, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the one place where rumours and news can spread like wildfire. Long before the mainstream media gets a hold of a story, it’s being circulated by countless people all over the world. With the fast pace of modern news, you need to make sure people are constantly on the case, and relaying any new developments. When things go from bad to worse in a matter of minutes, you need to know how to respond.
My final tip is more of a warning. If your company’s facing a crisis, whatever you do don’t bury your head in the sand. When confronted with a big, chaotic PR mess, you may feel like shutting down all communications, and refusing to talk to the press. If the future of my business was no object, this is exactly what I’d do too! Dealing with PR issues is one of the most stressful things any business owner will go through. However, in the majority of cases, it’s better to face the music than take a “no comment” approach. It’s true that making hasty decisions can be damaging. However, if your company’s suspected of something and you don’t release a single word, then this isn’t going to reflect well. As part of your crisis planning, you should draft a few pre-written statements, signed by your lawyers. When disaster strikes, you can simply pull these out and use them to buy some time. If none of these would help, then make sure you say something!
Even though these tips are pretty valuable, nothing can really prepare you for all the chaos of managing a PR crisis. However, when you set up some safety nets in advance, messes like these become a lot more manageable. Start today, and keep developing your crisis management until it’s airtight!
