The saying, “Forewarned is forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory”, is never truer than in a time of crisis. Similarly, in the words of football coach Jose Mourinho: “If you are prepared for the worst, you are prepared”.
Reputation is the beating heart of any business. Reputations can take decades – sometimes generations – to build, only to be destroyed in minutes, especially in the age of AI and social media.
A plan for communicating in a crisis is critical. When the worst happens, it will act as a first line of defence, buying valuable time to minimise adverse publicity and mitigate long-term reputational damage.
Do you have a plan for business crisis management? Not having a crisis comms plan is risky business. According to a recent CIPR survey, UK businesses rank reputational risk as a key concern, but many lack the in-house PR expertise to manage it. When it rains, it pours, so if you are one of these businesses, it really is time to get a plan.
Business crisis management
A crisis managed well will allow your organisation to bounce back quickly; a crisis managed poorly will mean sustained disruption and damage. The future risk to a company is at its height in the initial hours after a story breaks.
This blog will provide you with expert tips on crisis communications, managing risk, and protecting your brand from long-lasting reputational damage.
Prepare the Ground
Firstly, map out your risk: News travels fast – bad news even faster. So, you need to get a plan. Think of real-life worst-case scenarios your brand is likely to face, and detail a process and response mechanisms to prevent a crisis or mitigate its impact. Maybe it’s a massive data hack, serious accounting fraud, or a fire has ripped through your main warehouse, taking out your supply chain.
Assessing a company’s risk register means identifying potential issues and knowing how to respond organisationally to those challenges. Give equal thought to the impact on your business and your customers, for example, factor in different regional/national/global/demographic impacts? Can these impacts be minimised in any way? Do segmented audiences need specific messaging?
Where possible, message preparation before the crisis is essential. To be effective, messages must be credible to their audiences. Stick to one or two key messages.
Have an escalation procedure in place: You must know where your senior-level management is at any given time and how to escalate quickly up the chain to contain bad news.
There should be a direct line from comms to the top. A process for getting sign-off from key people in the organisation fast must be fleshed out. Ensure your spokespeople are media-trained, well-briefed, and easily contactable. Emergency contact numbers should be compiled.
Damage Limitation: Set Out the Facts Fast
Establish the facts as quickly as possible. Remember, you are in the eye of the storm – the full picture may still be unclear as initial information can be scant or based on hearsay evidence as the situation unfolds.
Your customers will rightly expect you to act quickly and address their concerns.
First of all, you’ll need to show grip and sure-footedness in the face of media scrutiny.
It’s essential to accept what has happened, acknowledge the uncertainty, outline the steps needed to fix the problem, and learn the lessons to move forward.
Provide answers to these five key questions as quickly as possible:
- What happened? If you don’t know all the facts, what do you know?
- Why did it happen?
- How are you going to get out of it?
- Are there any future potential disclosures that could inflict further damage on your brand?
- How can you ensure it doesn’t happen again?
Time is the Enemy
In the breakneck speed of social media, you won’t have long. Stories can gain traction in minutes online, and a one-hour turnaround crisis time on social is pushing it and not much longer for mainstream media, so it’s key to get a statement out faster than the news cycle.
It will also minimise speculation and the false reporting of facts, which, if not refuted instantly, can become fact all too quickly. Vacuums can, by their very nature, create a sense of chaos and panic. A simple ‘no comment’ in a crisis won’t fly.
Sorry Isn’t Always the Hardest Word
Don’t let the story own you. Take ownership early. The organisational tone of voice needs to be calm, authentic and authoritative. Be compassionate and show you care about your customers.
To show leadership and reassurance, any statement needs to come from the top, either your CEO or Chair. Make sure they are well-briefed and don’t answer questions that you may not yet have fully developed answers to. Better to say: “We don’t know the full details at this early stage” than to say something which later turns out to be untrue and gives the story future media mileage.
Only impart information to the public that is accurate and credible. Be upfront, transparent, and honest about your shortcomings and don’t be afraid to apologise. We’re all human, and mistakes can happen.
If an apology is required, it’s better to do it out of the gate than have it foisted on you by a media backlash, which often incurs longer-lasting brand damage.
Think of the United Airlines CEO who found himself in the middle of a firestorm after an incident on an aircraft where a passenger was forcibly and unceremoniously dragged off an overbooked plane, which went viral. Instead of issuing a quick, unreserved apology, he initially tried to dismiss the incident with a lukewarm response.
It was a miscalculation of the public mood, and a day later, he was forced to issue a full-throated apology after a fierce public backlash made United the top-trending topic on social media. An immediate apology would have limited the damage to both the brand and its share price.
Mission Control
Think about your comms delivery channel: you may want to seek to control the message in the first instance by using your own public-facing comms channels.
Take KFC: a supply-side issue left many of their restaurants without chicken. Forced to close outlets suddenly, the fast-food chain went straight to social media to get its message out quickly and reassure customers. Using humour to great effect with the ‘FCK’ campaign, showing an empty KFC bucket, their sassy media team turned a crisis into a win.
Social media is king: it’s timely, unfiltered, and most importantly, it allows you to control the story. X or Facebook enables your company to disseminate direct messages to your audience more frequently and widely. Keep it constantly updated, and journalists will know to check your chosen channel for updates.
Establish a trusted presence early. Whether you’re a business, a government department, a local emergency service, or a state entity, using a single trusted medium as a comms channel is essential. This is particularly true if the story is breaking news and the public needs to stay informed as a potentially dangerous situation unfolds.
Stick to the facts. Keeping the public and news outlets informed is critical in the first few moments after a major incident, and local police will often issue real-time social media updates on a developing situation that poses an urgent threat to people’s safety. It’s imperative as a direct means of communication with the public when details are scant, the situation is fast-moving and fluid, and misinformation is rampant.
Take the Metropolitan Police as an example. In the immediate aftermath of the London Bridge attack, they took to social media to provide rapid, factual updates on the incident and urge restraint in circulating images from the scene. This helped broadcasters report on the facts rather than on online speculation.
As the story breaks, be sure to monitor the comments to your posts, influencer blogs or journalists’ posts. React quickly to threads that may indicate problems on the ground or your message isn’t landing well.
Reporters will be monitoring these posts, and so should you. Critical trends may be emerging online. Complaints on social media act as an early-warning system of things going wrong in your crisis comms and shouldn’t be ignored.
Frontline Messaging
Ensure messaging is watertight and keep your employees informed. Staff should know the company’s official line and direct any journalists who may approach them for comment straight to your PR team.
All too often, internal communications are completely lost in a crisis, so remember to signpost staff to updated information and share all your public-facing media statements on the intranet. A company-wide email from the CEO can also reassure. Many employees often check social media before internal emails (especially if they’re off-site remote workers), so it’s a useful channel for speaking to staff as well as the public.
Staff should also feel able to feed in their customer experiences to management. As your organisation’s eyes and ears on the ground, they will hear complaints firsthand, which is a useful heatmap of how customers or service-users are really feeling.
Clear and consistent internal messaging will also help boost staff morale at a time of bad media headlines, as they will feel more confident that the exec team has a handle on the situation.
Maintain Discipline
Stay on message and quickly correct any inaccuracies reported in the news or on social media. Ensure clear lines of communication are in place with stakeholders, too, as they will also be contacted for media comment – update them on new lines as appropriate.
Don’t Overpromise and Underdeliver
Finally, manage expectations and ensure the public is informed of the situation in real-time. Do not be tempted to underestimate the scale of the challenge, as people will soon start to question why the resolution is taking longer than first thought.
Your reputation depends on getting the basics right when things go wrong – not doing so will devalue your brand’s most precious currency. Things can escalate quickly in a crisis, so covering the necessary groundwork beforehand will make your organisation much more resilient to such threats when they arise.
Planning for every eventuality is key. If your business, public sector organisation or charity needs a crisis comms plan, find out how our expert team can help here.
For recent case studies on how institutions such as the BBC and the Royal Family have managed a crisis, read our blog post. We also give you some handy tips on what a winning PR strategy looks like in another recent blog post.
