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 and buy valuable time to minimise adverse publicity and mitigate long-term reputational damage.
According to a recent CIPR survey, UK businesses place reputational risk as a key concern, but many do not have 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.
A crisis managed well will allow your business to bounce back quickly; a crisis managed badly will mean sustained disruption and damage. Future risk to a business is at its height in those initial hours after a story breaks.
This blog will give you expert tips on communicating in a crisis, managing risk and how to protect your brand from 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 that your business is likely to face and detail a process and response mechanisms to forestall a crisis or lessen its impact. Maybe it’s a huge data hack, serious 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 expect you to act fast and address their concerns.
You need to accept what has happened, that there is uncertainty, outline the immediate steps being taken to fix the problem and the lessons learned to move forward. You will need grip and sure-footedness in the face of media scrutiny.
Provide answers to these five key questions:
- 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 instantly refuted, can become a matter of 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.
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, 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 dragged off an overbooked plane 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 into a full-throated apology after a fierce public backlash made United the top trending topic on social. 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 suddenly close outlets, the fast-food chain went straight to social media to get its message out fast 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 importantly, it allows you to control the story. X allows your company to disseminate direct messages to your audience more frequently and widely. Keep it constantly updated, and journalists will know to look for updates on your chosen channel. Be sure to monitor the comments to your posts, influencer blogs or journalists’ posts relating to your story – and react fast to threads that may indicate your post-crisis solutions on the ground are not working or your message isn’t landing well. Journalists will be monitoring these posts, and so should you. Good customer service demands responding fast to any problems or critical trends that may be emerging on and offline. Complaints on social media act as an early-warning system of things going wrong 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 can be forgotten about in a crisis, so remember to signpost staff to updated information and share all company statements on the intranet. A company-wide email from the CEO can also reassure. Many staff 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 be hearing complaints at first hand, which is a useful heatmap on how customers are really feeling about the brand. Clear and consistent 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 being relayed in the news media or social media. Ensure clear lines of communication are in place with stakeholders too, as they will also be contacted for comment from the media – update them with new lines as appropriate. Think about using non-corporate assets for interviews: for example, case studies external to the corporate company structure or “friends of the show” can amplify your key messaging with a more human face and lend credibility.
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.
We hope you’ve found this post handy. If your business needs PR advice or is looking for an expert to write an eye-catching press release, find out more here.
