Crisis management is a fascinating field within the PR profession. During a crisis, the role of PR is enhanced by its ability in handling threatening media, and in safeguarding the reputation of a company.
Once a crisis ‘blows up’, an organization faces a growing uncertainty around its brand, the loss of control over the messages, and a consequent sense of isolation.
The direct consequences of this precarious status can be extremely dangerous for every company in this situation – from the small local one to the multinational. A loss of trust can easily translate into a loss of large amount of money.
One of the recurrent thoughts expressed in the PR literature about Crisis Management is the importance of recognizing possible crisis in advance, and to tackle it when it’s harmless. This practice is also known as issue management.
Today, a lot of the work of the PR professionals is to identify issues related to a company and manage them properly. The management of an issue is more likely to be a long-term practice; on the contrary the management of a crisis is immediate and fast moving.
With the diffusion of the Internet, the pace of crisis is even more rapid and it can easily reach a global audience. In the past few years, many corporate crises started online as they found companies unprepared to deal with Web 2.0 technologies.
A famous example of online crisis is the one started in 2005 by the journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis towards the computer company Dell. Writing in his blog BuzzMachine, Jarvis harshly criticized the company’s product and costumer service with a post titled: “Dell lies. Dell sucks”. In a few days, Jarvis’ blog became the most popular virtual place for sharing complaints among Dell’s frustrated clients. Eventually, the ‘buzz’ generated by the online community translated in offline media coverage creating a big negative impact on Dell’s reputation.
Dell’s primary fault was to not be able to monitor its online reputation. Secondly, Dell did not engage at all with its customers on the Internet. Finally, it took a long time to understand what happened and to change its online communication strategy. Only after a year, did Dell organize an online community (Direct2Dell) around its brand with several bloggers writing on its behalf and engaging with clients.
Dell’s case introduced the concept of the power of individual to effect change in the new social media contest. Since than, companies have perceived the Internet as a threat, “blaming social media for causing reputational crisis” – PR Week 19th March, Crisis comms moves online. The loss of control caused by the Web 2.0 applications has not been fully digested by many organizations.
Recently, many companies have been ‘forced’ to deal with the social media in period of crisis with varying degrees of success. For sure, crisis that starts online must be handled online. The video response of Domino’s Pizza CEO to the ‘prank’ video of two employees in 2009 on YouTube is an example of best practice of online crisis management. As the journalist Richard Levick writes in Business Week, the handling of the crisis was effective in the way it reached out a “target audience on its own terms and in its own preferred space”.
Even if social media “have really taken off in crisis management” – Andrew Griffin, Regester Larkin managing director, says at PR Week – every company must bear in mind that the principles of good crisis management still apply. Eddie Bensilum, director at Regester Larkin, explains how important the three C’s are in handling a crisis. A company must show Care and Concern, it must take the Control back, and finally it must show the Commitment to its stakeholders and society in general. Obviously, all these must be done in a very short period of time.
In my opinion, the use of social media facilitates the handling of a crisis. Given its popularity, new media has the potential to easily and instantly reach large number of audiences. On the other hand, it gives the chance to a company to directly communicate with its public without the filter of traditional media, increasing the level of control on the message conveyed.
For sure, social media will be used more and more in the future to monitor the reputation of a company. Thanks to free easy-to-use applications such as Google Alerts or TweetDeck, it is possible to track the majority of online conversations that are related to a brand or an organization. In this way, the transparency of social media allows companies to identify certain issues and to prevent potential pricey crisis.
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