PR disasters happen; it’s the response that counts

By Claire Ayles

Ransomware attacks, corporate scandals, product recalls, service outages, poorly behaved employees – bad things happen, even to good companies. And when the unthinkable does occur, there’s always a risk that the news will spill over into the public domain, inflicting reputational and financial damage on your organisation.

To minimise the impact of negative press headlines and social media storms, it’s vital that you have a robust communications strategy in place; one that helps you keep control of your own story.

Here are our tips for PR in a crisis:

1: Act fast

When a crisis hits, there’s little or no time to ruminate over possible courses of action – you need to act immediately. Indeed, speed is more important than perfection, you can always refine your response plan as the situation evolves.

What’s more, the moment your organisation becomes aware of the incident is the moment to involve your PR team. You’ll need comms expertise at the table to steer your immediate response.

2: Take responsibility

This is no time for excuses. Acknowledge what’s happened and try to be as honest, authentic, and transparent as possible, as these are all attributes that your stakeholders will appreciate. Hiding things that could later emerge, or trivialising something that is serious, could make a bad situation even worse. It’s also a good idea for a senior leader to act as spokesperson as this shows your whole organisation is taking the situation seriously.

3: Stay on the front foot

Another way of illustrating that you have control of the situation is by being proactive. Explain what you are doing to resolve the situation before you do it and provide some specifics if you can. This will underline the point that you are determined to get things back to normal.

4: Consider all stakeholders

Reassure not only your customers and shareholders but also your employees, managers, suppliers, the local community, and any other observers who are pivotal to your organisation. All these groups play an important role in the success of your organisation, so they need to have confidence in your ability to stabilise operations. Furthermore, remember to adapt your message to each group’s needs and concerns. They don’t all need to hear the same information.

5: Utilise multiple channels

Press releases, media interviews, web statements, personalised emails, phone calls from the CEO, social media posts – these are just a selection of the communications channels you can leverage to reach your different stakeholders. It’s important that each person is contacted over a channel they use, in a format that’s appropriate. After all, what works for your customers probably won’t work for your investors.

6: Avoid the non-apology

Over the past decade, global politics has become awash with ‘fauxpologies’, and it’s a trend that’s spilt over into the corporate world. ‘I’m sorry if you’re offended by our company’s behaviour’ is not an apology, and your audience will think less of you for using this tone and language. If you’re sorry, say so directly, with genuine remorse. Anything less is just patronising.

7: Have eyes everywhere

Make sure you monitor the media as well as social media platforms around-the-clock to gauge how the story is unfolding and to assess reader sentiment. There are dozens of tools available to help you track and measure the impact and it’s important to take the pulse of your brand, both during and after the event.

8: Apply what you’ve learnt

You will learn a lot about yourself, your organisation, and your team if you work through a crisis together. Post event, you should reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how things could be improved. These frontline insights will be vital if you every have a repeat situation to manage.

9: Reputational reset

The phrase ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper’ no longer applies. The pervasiveness of digital media together with the power of search engines mean that your bad news story could live forever online. Once the dust has settled, try to implement a PR strategy to rebuild and reset your reputation, for example, by talking about your ESG goals, happy customers, award-winning operations, and more. A solid reputation is your best defence against negative publicity and will help push those negative stories further down your Google results.

Preparation beats panic

While you can’t always predict a disaster, you can prepare for one. Most organisations will have a disaster recovery plan in place that’s designed to get their operations back up and running after an incident. These plans should contain or be accompanied by a PR crisis management plan that covers internal and external communications.

As well as defining roles and responsibilities for all key personnel, your crisis comms plan should set out the steps your organisation should follow in response to different incidents. Then, if something unexpected and unwanted does happen, you have a clear action plan to follow, helping you to minimise reputational damage, with no panic or indecision.