Most organisations will encounter a communications crisis at some point in time.
It could be anything from a product recall or backlash against an advert to negative publicity about an investor or financial issues.
While the reasons that could plunge a brand or business into reputational chaos are many, the pathway to navigate through a crisis is relatively straightforward.
If your business or organisation is navigating a PR disaster, then here’s some advice to help you get through it.
Communicate
Acknowledge the issue.
Be honest and say there’s an issue, and say you’re working fast to fix it.
Why do you need to say something, even if you don’t have any or all the details?
Silence creates a vacuum that will be filled by speculation.
By communicating that you’re aware of the problem, you’re being honest that there’s an issue and that you’re working on it. The media will give you grace, as will your customers. You will get the opportunity to figure it out, but only if you come clean at the beginning.
Think of your issue like a fire.
Ignoring the issue – e.g. blanking the media or leaving your customers waiting for answers online – is like pouring petrol on that fire. Don’t do that.
What you say at this point doesn’t have to be chapter and verse – “We are aware of this and our teams are working quickly to get the answers you need. We will contact you in the next hour with an update,” will suffice.
If an hour passes with no update, send the same message again.
Tell your audiences you’re still working on it, and you’ll have an update for them as soon as you can.
The simplest terms to think about this part of the plan is this.
You’ve likely experienced a flight delay.
What annoys you more? The delay? Or when you’re left sitting in departures for hours on end with no idea when you’ll be getting on the plane. Would you still feel angry if you knew your delay was because of high winds and that you wouldn’t be taking off for two hours? Of course. But if you didn’t have any of that information and nobody was on the airline desk to help you, you’d be absolutely raging.
Think about that. Leave a journalist hanging, or an online audience waiting without explanation, at your peril.
Clarity
You’ve acknowledged there’s a problem and that you’re working on it. Now it’s time for some internal clarity, before we go external.
Your communications team needs to know EVERYTHING. Unvarnished, raw truth. The deepest, darkest secret of what’s caused the issue needs to be clearly and honestly communicated to your PR/media team. They cannot help if they don’t know the full story.
Once the full scope of the issue has been identified, then you need to prepare a statement.
Some people in leadership think they need to write 1,000 words at this point. In my opinion, that’s not the right approach.
Create a statement that addresses the issue, and nothing else. This isn’t an opinion piece; it’s a simple statement that clearly communicates:
· What the issue is, with an apology
· Next steps
· Details on when the next steps will be complete
That’s it. Anything else doesn’t matter at this stage.
Be serious. Be concise. Be clear. Be quick.
Care
This is mentioned in the previous point. It’s born from the sheer number of statements I see from companies that are missing the most important point – care.
We understand when legal issues are involved (as they sometimes are in these cases), saying sorry can seem like an omission of guilt. However, you must say sorry for the impact for customer trust and brand reliability.
What we’re trying to say is this.
If your issue has negatively impacted a person, a community, a family – whatever it may be – you must apologise. This isn’t about your brand or your reputation – it’s about the damage that’s been done to your audience.
It’s ok to say sorry. Nobody will ever come after you for that.
If you go straight into defence mode without offering sympathies or apologies to the people or things you’ve hurt, then you’re in trouble. Don’t do that. Be human about it. Care about the impact your issue has caused.
Communication
Now you understand the issue and you’ve apologised; the next step is to communicate.
This should only be done if there’s anything to communicate by the way – you don’t need to attract more attention to any issues that have been resolved by this point. You would be surprised at how many people are tempted to do that. Don’t.
If the issue on-going, then it’s important to communicate regularly with the impacted audiences. Let’s take an example of a music streaming service that’s facing days of outage.
If the issue has been acknowledged and an apology has been issued, but the service remains down, then it’s time to keep communicating updates with customers, media, stakeholders.
Again, like the point above, the statements in this part of the process don’t need to be longwinded. Just simple, clear updates of what’s happening and the steps that are being taken, with an estimated fix date (if that’s available, sometimes it isn’t).
Keep it consistent too. Brief, regular updates until everything is fixed.
Counsel
The last, but probably most important point, is counsel.
You’d expect someone who works in a communications consultancy to say this, but…
If you’re a senior leader in a business that’s facing an issue, then listen to you PR team or agency.
If you're unfamiliar with media or have never spoken to a journalist, a crisis isn't the time to start.
Business owners and leaders who don’t understand communications tend to do one of two things in this scenario, in my experience. Both are equally as bad. They either:
a) Ignore the media/customers/audiences as they don’t know what to say and hope it goes away.
b) Over explain issues in highly technical details, giving away far too much company information and bamboozling audiences in the process.
A good comms or PR person will stop you from doing this. Use them. And trust them.
Also – to conclude – it’s often a good idea to have a PR person in the boardroom when you’re making a strategic business decision in times of crisis, or in times when you might be heading to a crisis. I’ll give you an example.
There’s a well-known story in our industry about a big brand. During a significant and tragic event in a city once upon a time, demand for the brand’s services went through the roof. Senior leaders wanted to increase prices for profitability purposes. The PR people obviously rejected this on a human and professional level. Who wants to profit from an event where people lost their lives? Nobody in their right mind.
The senior leaders rejected the advice from the PR team and increased the prices. If you’ve got this far in the article, you can guess what happened – their reputation took a major hit.
To summarise
The best advice we can give is this.
Acknowledge the issue – don’t ignore it.
Find out what’s happening – and tell your PR/comms team.
Tell your audience in an honest, humble, informative and apologetic way.
Let your audience know it’s been resolved.
Move on.
