Crisis is a dangerous word and it shakes the nerves of the communicators who stumble in the excruciating grip of it. It is always hard to manage this fallout.
In this era of connected channels and freedom of voice, crisis management becomes very challenging. For brands and businesses, this situation is a total disaster that could cause them to lose their reputation and connection to their followers. In order to avoid this, companies need to develop some useful strategies to combat the struggling reputation and trust war with their followers.
So, let’s discuss what really happens during crisis management, what should be done, and what you can learn from the situation.
Understanding Crisis Management
Crisis management is a strategic response to a critical or troubling event. Any situation, or even response, could trigger a disruptive situation in the media and can lead to a critical situation for a brand or company.
In these situations, companies prepare a thoughtful and problem-solving statement to de-escalate the heat of the problem. The process of identifying the problem, analyzing the situation, and creating a well-thought-out response for the audience are all included in the crisis management essentials.
The following are the different forms of crisis that could occur to a company:
- Financial Crisis
- Data Breach
- Workplace Violence
- Mismanagement In Decisions
- Leaders Giving Wrong/Offensive Statements
- Lawsuits Situations
- Natural Disaster
Types of Crisis Management
A crisis does not always have a typical approach or resolution. But any situation, wrong comment or move taken by a brand could also lead to an offensive and argumentative situation for them. Brands are very careful of their image, and that’s why they apply different types of crisis management techniques and principles to tackle the troubling ground. These techniques are:
- Crisis Communication
- Crisis Recovery
- Accommodative Crisis Management
- Crisis Procedure Adherence
- Risk Assessment And Planning
- Incident Response
- Business Continuity
Strategies To Adopt For Crisis Management
In the age of social media, any type of news is shared in no time. But when it comes to negativity, misinformation, or information leak, the same news spread like wildfire across the world. The people on the internet don’t care about their words, but brands, they have to analyze the situation and carefully use their platform to address the problem.
The following are the crisis management essentials that you need to keep in mind to tackle problematic situations:
Develop A Crisis Management Plan
For effective crisis management, creating a before hand plan is the first and most important step in this process. You never know when the tables are turned for you, and your happy hour could vanish into hot waters.
Big brands use this strategy, they already have a detailed crisis management plan that has all the protocols, useful steps and analytic approach listed in it that helps them counter a negative situation.
It is a proactive plan that involves the strategies and its application, use of helpful tools for communication to the audience. It is best to develop a separate crisis management team that consistently works with the marketing department of the company. In this way, the combined tracking of analytics can help identify the problem or its pattern beforehand and could avoid the emergence of crisis.
Monitor Online Response
In the digital world, keeping an active and close eye on social media is the only way to avoid the troublesome situation. Social media has made it very easy for companies to understand and study audience response freely. The social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Brandwatch have comprehensive and AI-powered features in them that can help you track and analyze the sentiments of the audiences easily.
Before any crisis, you can keep a consistent study of the social channels and can spot a troublesome situation beforehand and can fix it. But if the crisis is already at the doorstep, then use the tracking features of these tools to analyze the situation in no time and act accordingly to fix the issues.
Develop An Authentic Response
In the scenario of crisis management, the most crucial step is to handle the process of response. After encountering the troublesome situation, the strategic crisis management depends on the response generated by the company.
Today, all brands and companies use social media for communication. Navigating media crisis involves giving quick responses and answers to handle the troublesome situation.
Strategic crisis management also involves being careful and authentic in your response to the audience. When a brand uses personal and real tone in their messaging, it feels more authentic and genuine and the audience can understand that the brand was accountable and positive in its response.
In 1982, the quick response action taken by Johnson & Johnson for facing a major crisis on their label was recorded to be one of the best crisis management examples of all time. The story when the death news of 7 people ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules went viral. The brand activated its media crisis navigation strategy, monitored the sentiments and response of the public, and shared a very personal and authentic response to tackle the dangerous situation for its brand.
Use Employees As Brand Ambassadors
Every brand has its own story and message to it. Protecting your brand story is very crucial and it can only be done with the most personal approach applied by your brand.
When navigating a media crisis, your brand must have a real response to answer your followers and audiences’ concerns. It’s common to take the approach of social media for quick response, but a more careful move involves using brand ambassadors to handle the situation.
A brand ambassador is the visceral face of the brand for the followers, and for companies, their brand ambassadors are their employees. You can use your employees to record a video response to hold an accountable conversation about the problem. The employees can discuss the problem, your company’s response, and future approaches for the same issues.
Learn And Adapt For Future
After a crisis, the first thing to do is to analyze the whole situation again and make a future plan about it to avoid a similar situation again.
The crisis management process is not complete without making strategies for the future. So, if you have passed the troublesome situation, perform an analysis over it.
Gather your crisis management response team, discuss the problem, analyze the whole procedure of situation handling, study audience response and post crisis sentiments and opinions and make a report of it.
This will help you develop a new and strategic approach to make a better crisis management plan and strategic crisis protocols so that you can handle a troubling situation the next time in a more effective way.
Final Thoughts
No brand can imagine when a crisis would knock on their door, but there is always a better way to manage the situation. In the digital age, the use of social media has created both ease and problems.
For strategic crisis management, the brand must use social media in a proactive way and should act with a plan to handle the situation in a very personal manner. With a crisis management plan in hand, you can always help your brand get out of the troubling situation in a careful and positive way to protect the reputation of the brand.
