6 Steps to Handling a PR Crisis in Your Business
At some stage, you may find yourself facing a PR crisis in your business. It could be anything from a product safety issue to a bad review that goes viral, and how you respond can either significantly boost your image or damage your brand.
With 24-hour news and the internet at everyone’s fingertips these days, you need to be ready to act when it happens. Here are our top 6 tips for crisis management.
1. Be prepared
In an ideal world, you’ll already have a crisis communications policy in place. (We can help with that if you need a hand – just get in touch.) This will include a list of your crisis response team members along with their contact details and responsibilities – who is cleared to give media interviews, for example.
Depending on your business, and the crisis itself, it might be useful to have someone on standby with an outside perspective. This can help when gauging how what has happened – and your reaction – looks to outside parties such as your customers and the general public.
2. Brief your team
It’s important everyone in your business knows what to do in the event of a public relations crisis. You might have the perfect official statement ready to go, but if just one member of staff is waylaid by a journalist and doesn’t know how to react, it could be for nothing.
Make sure everyone is clear on how to handle inquiries from the media, where to direct concerned customers, or how to respond to worried shareholders. It can help to work up several different scenarios to use as examples, so everyone understands their roles.
3. Form your response
How you respond to events will, of course, be determined by what has happened. Being open and honest is always the best policy – people want to know you understand how they are affected and what you plan to do to rectify the situation.
In some cases there may be legal considerations where an apology could be seen as an admission of guilt. Your lawyer will be able to advise you, but it should be possible to say sorry without accepting blame.
A good rule of thumb is to take responsibility and be clear you’re doing everything you can to avoid it happening again. A personal apology from the managing director, for instance, can go a long way to mollifying anger and help quell a social media storm.
4. Identify and address those affected
Different issues will affect different people. Some crises may involve stakeholders, while others may impact your customers or result in a public outcry. Regardless of who is involved, it’s important you respond as quickly as possible.
If you’ve cultivated a relationship with any media outlets, you might have contacts who are sympathetic to your cause. That doesn’t mean for a moment they will gloss over the issue at hand, but you can be more confident they’ll treat you fairly.
5. Monitor the situation
A PR crisis can run and run, so it’s vital you stay on top of the fallout to protect your company’s image. Monitoring media coverage and online chatter is essential, as is frequently reassuring customers or stakeholders.
In fact, you should track what people are saying about your business as a matter of course. Assign somebody to draw up a list of relevant keywords and use them to regularly check Google images, online review sites and social media.
6. Review and reflect
Once the situation has calmed down, take time to review what has happened and how you reacted. What could have been handled differently, or done better? Make sure everyone involved is able to have a frank and honest discussion – that way, you’ll have a better understanding of how it worked and what changes you might need to make.
Take time also to plan some positive PR around your brand to help shift the focus from what has just happened.
A few things not to do
As well as deciding what you will do, there are a few things to avoid as part of your crisis response strategy:
‘No comment’ is never a good response. Sometimes you may be genuinely unable to answer a question, but this phrase can give the impression you’re trying to avoid the issue or, worse, cover something up. It’s ok to be honest – say you need to gather more information before replying or that you’ll make a statement after consulting with your advisers.
Don’t ignore deadlines. If you agree to contact a journalist with a statement or information by a certain time, do it. Breaking the agreed deadline looks bad and gives the impression you’re not trustworthy. It won’t make the crisis go away, either.
Don’t lash out. Emotions may be running high, and it can be tempting to hit back if someone has asked a difficult question or said something bad about your business. Difficult though it is, keep your temper. Never resort to insults, mud slinging or trying to push the blame onto someone else.