Much is made of how to respond to PR crises, but one important point is often overlooked: Many crises can be avoided by maintaining healthy relationships with the organization’s stakeholders. If stakeholders trust the organization, it can cope with most problems; if relationships sour, crises become more likely.
The key is to vigilantly monitor relationships. PR measurement expert Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing, explains a six-step process for how to avoid a crisis by measuring your community relationships in a recent blog post in The Measurement Advisor. Here’s a summary:
1. Construct a detailed list as possible of the segments of the community – everyone from government officials, customers, noncustomers, the media, and other influencers and stakeholders.
2. Determine how the quality of the relationship with each group influences your organization. Complete a spreadsheet to organize the relationships.
3. Prioritize. Rank these publics based on their importance to your organization. Assume you will have enough resources to measure three to five, at least initially. So the audiences that are the most important get surveyed first.
4. Agree on a benchmark. Identify something to compare the strength of your community relations against, for instance, other communities or similar companies in the community or elsewhere. Consider benchmarking against an organization in another community. A competing company is unlikely to operate in the same community.
5. Monitor the media. Monitoring the media entails completing a content analysis. Subscribe to every news source in the area and collect articles and mentions from all local media sources. A media monitoring service is often a cost-efficient method to track all news and social media mentions of the organization.
6. Analyze your data, draw conclusions and make recommendations. Analyze how the media relay your messages, how messages resonate in the community. Determine to what extent the coverage is accurate, balanced and fair. Ideally, you should find local community residents to read the articles. Professional communicators read and comprehend media messages differently than local residents.
More Crisis Preparation Recommendations
Preparation is the clearly best PR crisis management strategy. A blueprint with clear procedures will avoid desperate thoughtless reactions at the onset of a crisis.
Create a crisis response team. Select an executive with authority to approve public and internal communications as well as single corporate spokesperson. Establishing clear roles for your team will avoid releasing conflicting messages caused by the classic too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen syndrome.
Consider simulations to train PR and corporate communications teams. Some of the companies offering social media crisis training include HootSuite, Polpeo, Social Simulator, and SayItSocial.
Develop press contacts. Establish relationships with journalists covering your industry and region before a crisis erupts. Give them information and access to create trust. Reporters who already know you are more likely to produce balanced coverage rather than seek comments to support their preconceived ideas.
Set down clear lines of communication between your PR team and key decision makers, between employees and supervisors, employees and the public and employees and the media. Decide what information key stakeholders should know and what to withhold due to confidential or security reasons.
Bottom Line: Establishing strong relationships is essential for avoiding PR crises and weathering problems that do arise. Experts agree that comprehensive news media monitoring that includes print, broadcast, and social media, is an essential component for detecting emerging crises and countering ongoing crises.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
