A crisis can happen in the blink of an eye. There's been an accident and an employee has been hurt. a staff member is taking your business to court, your trade secrets have been leaked. In this section you are going to learn all about crisis communications. A crisis has occurred when an event affecting the company or person has serious negative effects. For example, a company's technology being hacked and customer details leaked, or a company causing an environmental disaster, or someone in the company's care coming to harm trade secrets being leaked by a disgruntled employee or a natural disaster affecting the company's employees and customers.

If a crisis isn't properly managed, and contained, it can quickly get out of control. This can do a lot of damage to the company's reputational public image that can often have financial consequences. It's therefore important to handle a crisis with care. But remember that your objectives in crisis communication On not to cover up the crisis they should be to minimize the reputational damage. Authenticity is key. The best way you can manage the fallout from any type of crisis is to have a crisis plan in place.

A crisis plan is a document that is developed with all stakeholders in the business and contains a risk analysis. What types of crises is the company likely to face a team analysis who should be on the crisis team steps in dealing with the crisis and potentially crisis simulation. But you should always build your profile over the long term through integrated PR because crisis management is much more effective when your business already has a positive profile. These are the steps in dealing with the crisis and we're going to go through each of them one by one. Start with the facts gather the facts, including exactly what's happened, what's being done to rectify it, and where you are now, who's been affected, for example, customers staff, the local community families, schoolchildren, partner organizations Who is advising on the legal side of the crisis? Consider whether you need to pause all marketing.

While you're dealing with a crisis you really don't want the business to be promoting its Valentine's Day offers and branding lighthearted social campaigns. Pause all social and other marketing activity until you show that they're not going to cause offence. Get your crisis team together, your crisis team will include spokespeople, legal counsel, other relevant team members and whoever deals with the media. Most likely you it's important that you alert all employees of where to direct inquiries quickly ensure that everyone knows who inquiries should be directed to. Then you decide on how to respond. Do you need to make a proactive statement or could you rather react to Meteor inquiries as they come in?

A proactive statement might flag the crisis to journalists who didn't know about it before. Then you develop your response including a statement for the medium, a version of the statement for staff customers and other affected groups. The list of expected questions and answers. It's usually best to keep statements neutral, factual and honest. Don't speculate, simply cover. We know this has happened.

It's unfortunate and regrettable. We're still investigating or cooperating with authorities. And we'll provide more information as it comes available. When it comes to managing the meteor in the crisis. Remember that they will want facts and they will want to be the first to get them. Anything you write or say could get quoted and used out of context, which could make things worse.

So just be careful what you say, casually in a conversation or what you write in your emails. It's therefore important that you keep your comments neutral, simple and honest. Assume that anything you've put in writing can be leaked. Whoever answers the phone or answers meter inquiries or social media inquiries should be briefed to be neutral and honest and not to withhold facts that are readily or elsewhere available. a press release which answers the questions who I where, when and what should be immediately prepared. The crisis team can then decide whether to issue it proactively, or use it in specific queries.

You also need to set up a meteor inquiry log which would contain the date the name of the journalists the questions asked the telephone number, who was responsible for responding what the response was, and what the outcome was. Make sure you follow up on any loose ends or open inquiries so that it doesn't look like you're hiding. And finally, analyze and improve. This is where you meet with the PR team and analyze how the crisis was handled, what could have been done better, and you update your crisis plan for the future. You obviously do this once the crisis has been resolved. And because so many crises cover ethical and legal issues, you really do need a good grasp of PR ethics and the law, which is what we're going to cover in the next section.

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