Crises affect all companies, all brands. For the best-run companies, they can be an opportunity to re-establish a personal link with the consumer. For poorly-run companies, they can be very dangerous indeed.

At Market Sentinel we specifically address the online aspects of a crisis - adverse commentary and how to respond. But in truth the response online must be of a piece with every other action taken by the company. A committee should be formed to deal with the issue, either chaired by, or directly answerable to the chief executive. The PR function must be integrated with corporate communications, HR (for internal communications), marketing and press. Everyone must be given a crib sheet with the results of the commentary and the agreed action and response to them.

There are four steps to crisis management:

1) you monitor. Who is talking about you and what are they saying? 2) you review. Do you have to act? If so, how quickly. 3) you act. You do whatever you have to to avert catastrophe, adjust your pricing, change your competitive positioning, review your business process. 4) you talk about it. You make the chief executive available for interview by press and television, but this often takes vital hours. In the meantime you must - yourself - get into the blogosphere. At the very minimum that means that you make your press releases RSS indexable. ( Go here to do this quickly and cheaply.) Even better you set up your own blog where you talk about what you are doing, and why you are doing it.

Don’t go off half-cocked. Don’t issue a press statement or put anything on your website until you know what the grounds of the crisis is. Don’t delay. Find out as much as you can as quickly as you can. Publish soon. Establish procedures for getting the Chief Executive to give accelerated sign-off in these cases. Still in the dark? Use the web to gather information. Use the questions from users and customers to generate an FAQs and give that FAQs to customer service off-line.

Here is an article we wrote recently dealing with specifically digital brand risks.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2005 at 5:41 pm and is filed under PR, Market Sentinel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.