Every PR executive will be aware of the truism that a reputation takes a lifetime to build, and a moment to destroy. That’s why crisis communication is one of the key responsibilities of a corporate PR team, to protect the brand’s reputation in the event of an unexpected public event that could reflect negatively on the company and its stakeholders.
While the fun part of PR focuses on brand building, media relations, and creative campaigns, crisis communications is often seen as the less enjoyable side of the job, but it’s essential, and many executives find they relish the challenge of successfully handling a crisis under pressure.
In this article we’ll cover all the important elements of building a crisis communication strategy so that you’re ready to deal with whatever the world throws at you.
Contents
What Is Crisis Communication?
What are the Golden Rules of Crisis Communication?
How To Develop a Crisis Communication Plan and Strategy
What are Some Crisis Communication Examples?
Crisis Communication Tools
Measuring and Evaluating Crisis Communication
What Is Crisis Communication?
The term “crisis communication” refers to the communications activity carried out by an organization’s public relations team in response to an incident that could have a damaging effect on its reputation. Managing crisis communications involves correcting misinformation promptly, giving the media accurate information, and ensuring that the company’s response to the crisis is fairly represented in the press.
The ultimate goal is to maintain trust with all stakeholders (such as customers, investors, employees, and partners) and to mitigate any potential damage to the company’s reputation as a result of the crisis. Sometimes it’s even possible to turn a crisis situation into a positive outcome for the brand, by handling it in a way that is authentic and transparent.
The key elements of effective crisis communication are:
- A designated crisis communication team
- Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
- Appropriate and regular crisis training
- An up-to-date media kit containing essential information
- A well tested and regularly rehearsed plan
The benefit of having a crisis communication plan in place is simply that when the unexpected happens, you’ll be prepared for it. Maybe you won’t have predicted the exact crisis that hits your organization, but it will most likely be something similar to the possible events you will have thought about and planned for. Even being only half ready for a crisis is infinitely better than not being ready at all.
What are the Golden Rules of Crisis Communication?
We believe the most important rules of successful crisis communication can be distilled down to these six guidelines.
- Proactivity: It’s important to always be on the front foot, both in preparing for a potential crisis and in managing one that is in play. Always be working to get ahead of the situation.
- Transparency: It’s critical that the press and your stakeholders see you being open and honest about the situation, even if things are still unclear. This will build trust.
- Empathy: Understand how the crisis is impacting other people and organizations, then demonstrate that you care about it. Don’t focus only on your own difficulties.
- Consistency: Ensure that all communications from your organization are properly coordinated so that there’s no confusion caused by people receiving inconsistent messages.
- Accessibility: Journalists and other stakeholders should be able to easily find the information they need from you across all of your channels. Equally, spokespeople should be available to answer questions as much as possible.
- Adaptability: Be ready to deal with a fast changing situation. It’s good to have a plan, but it’s also important to know when the plan needs to change.
Follow these guiding principles, and you’ll be able to stay on top of any crisis that comes your way.
How To Develop a Crisis Communication Plan and Strategy
Over the decades crisis communications planning has become a well defined discipline. So many organizations have had the opportunity to learn from live crisis situations that there are plenty of case studies to learn from, and best practices are widely established.
Identify the risks
Map out all of the possible scenarios that could create a crisis for your organization. Brainstorm with people from different departments, look at historical crises that have happened to competitors or comparable companies.
Of course it’s impossible to predict every possible crisis, the world is too unpredictable, but you can prepare for the most likely ones.
Establish a crisis monitoring program
Use a media monitoring and social listening tool, like Meltwater, to track mentions of your brand and organization names, the names of senior executives, and any other keywords that could be relevant to a potential problem.
Most importantly, use the tool’s alert feature to ensure that whenever an unexpected spike in mentions of these search terms occurs, the crisis management team will immediately be informed. You don’t want to wait for a weekly report to realize a problem began five days ago.
Create a crisis management team
When a crisis hits, it's important that everybody understands their roles and responsibilities. Most important of all, who will take charge of the situation to marshal the rest of the team, and who has the authority to give final approval to all communications? Be sure to include the legal department!
If everybody is aware of what they need to do, and the reporting lines are clearly laid out, your crisis response will spin up quicker, and work better, than if your team has to waste time figuring out what they’re supposed to be doing.
Prepare messaging
The exact messaging you want to push out will depend on the nature of the crisis you are responding to, but there will be many elements that remain consistent across all situations and can be prepared beforehand. What do you want stakeholders and the wider public to know about your organization’s values, and its intended response to the crisis?
Select communication channels
When you need to put out your messaging, how will you do it? Plan out which of your owned social and online channels you will use to communicate, and which media you will reach out to - this means creating a target list of journalists and influencers that you already have a good relationship with.
Knowing which channels you plan to use will help you prepare content in all required formats. If you plan to include social media, you will also need a plan for how to respond to comments and messages on those channels.
Create an action plan
Map out all of the tasks that need to be undertaken once a crisis has been identified (monitoring, reporting, team meetings, communications, approvals, etc) along with delivery timelines, and expectations for who will be responsible for each item.
Your crisis communication plan should include clear guidelines on how to handle media inquiries, internal communications, stakeholder communications, and social media responses.
Test and refine your strategy
Once you have created a comprehensive crisis communication strategy, it’s important to test it so that your team has experience of carrying out all of their responsibilities in a safe environment. Testing will also help you to identify areas where your plan needs to be improved.
The best way to test your crisis communication plan is to role-play a real crisis, and this is usually best done with help from an external organization, such as a PR agency. Most larger agencies will offer crisis communications training and preparation services, but if your existing agency does not then you can find a specialist consultancy to help.
You should update and test your crisis communication strategy on a regular basis, ideally at least once a year.
What are Some Crisis Communication Examples?
Below are a few crisis communication plan examples from of the world's leading brands. Let's dive in!
Starbucks Philadelphia arrests
In 2018 two African American businessmen were arrested at a Starbucks cafe while waiting for an associate. The event was filmed by a bystander, and quickly went viral, sparking widespread condemnation of Starbucks and the police, along with accusations of racial profiling.
Starbucks at first released a statement promising to review its policies, which was accused of insincerity. This was followed by a statement and video from the company’s CEO in which he took personal accountability for the situation, talked specifically about the issues involved, and committed to take action to prevent similar failings in the future. The company also closed 8,000 stores for a day to give staff racial bias training.
It’s clear that Starbucks didn’t get its response right straight away, but this example serves as a lesson on the importance of leaders showing humility and taking personal responsibility for the problems at their organization.
Apple iPhone 4 antenna flaw
When Apple released the highly anticipated iPhone 4 in 2010, reports began circulating that there was a problem with the antenna which caused signal loss and sometimes dropped calls when the phone was held in a certain position. For a brand which had built smartphone market dominance on a reputation of flawless reliability and engineering excellence, this was hugely embarrassing.
Tech journalists were quick to amplify the story, with experts in the media carrying out technical tests that confirmed the problem was real. Realizing that the issue was in danger of spinning out of control and causing long term damage to Apple’s hard won reputation, the company acted decisively.
Steve Jobs personally apologized for the problem, and held a press conference where journalists were invited to tour Apple’s antenna lab and speak directly with the company’s antenna design expert. At the conference it was announced that everybody who purchased an iPhone 4 would be offered a free “bumper case” which was proven to correct the issue.
A critical technical issue such as this could have given Apple’s growing number of competitors an easy win, but the company managed to contain the crisis and maintain its position as the market leader for years to come.
KFC chicken shortage
In early 2018 KFC was forced to close the majority of its 900 UK restaurants after suffering from supply chain problems which left it without any chicken. Pretty embarrassing for a brand which sells fried chicken and nothing but fried chicken.
Being one of the world’s best known fast food brands, this story was quickly picked up by the media and KFC found itself being ridiculed in the national press. This also created an opportunity for one of the UK’s biggest trade unions to publicly air its grievances with the company, so the reputational risk soon became about more than a simple logistical hiccup.
The supply chain problems were resolved within a week and restaurants were able to reopen, but KFC wanted to repair the damage, so it took out full page adverts in the national newspapers with a direct apology to customers. The headline “We’re Sorry” was followed by a clear explanation of what went wrong, and what the company was doing to rectify the situation.
But what really caught everybody’s attention was the large photo of a KFC bucket with its logo tweaked to say FCK - a risky approach which paid off, giving us a great example of how humor can be used to win hearts and minds.
Crisis Communication Tools
A media intelligence tool like Meltwater Media Intelligence, or more broadly a social listening tool like Meltwater Explore, will be invaluable for crisis communications. First and most importantly, they can be used to provide an early warning of any potential crisis before it snowballs out of control.
By monitoring not only mentions your brand, but relevant keywords linked to your business, and setting up alerts for any unexpected spikes, you’ll be immediately notified whenever there’s an unusual increase in people talking about you. Not only that, but Meltwater’s AI tools will help you quickly get to the bottom of what’s driving those discussions so you’ll know right away if there’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
As well as monitoring for mention spikes, you can also track other metrics that could be indicators of a brewing crisis, such as a rapid shift in sentiment, or an increase in engagement on your owned social channels.
Apart from acting as an early warning system, these tools can also be used to track your progress in responding to a crisis, by measuring changing sentiment and tracking the topicality of conversation around your brand, to understand whether your messages are cutting through.
Measuring and Evaluating Crisis Communication
Although an unfolding crisis might seem fast-moving and chaotic, you can still measure what’s happening and how your response is being received, which will help you make better decisions in the moment as well giving you insight into how your crisis comms strategy can be improved in future. Here are some of the metrics that you should consider measuring in a crisis situation:
- Impressions: The number of times your messages are displayed across all channels.
- Reach: The number of unique individuals who have been exposed to your message.
- Engagement: The number of people who interact with your content (likes, shares, comments) relative to the total number of people who see it.
- Share of Voice: The proportion of your brand's mentions versus your competitors or the total mentions in your industry.
- Sentiment: The overall tone of the conversation about your brand (positive, negative, neutral) in social and legacy.
- Sentiment Over Time: Tracking changes in sentiment before, during, and after the crisis.
- Legacy Media Coverage: The number of media articles or broadcasts mentioning your brand.
- Influencer Impact: Tracking mentions and support from influencers or key opinion leaders.
Remember, crisis communications might not be the fun side of Public Relations that attracted you to the job, but it’s certainly one of the most important responsibilities of the role, so it’s essential to take a methodical approach. With proper planning and preparation, you’ll be able to take any unexpected situation in your stride, and nothing looks better on a PR professional’s resumé than a successfully handled brand crisis.
