Coaching

Being prepared is everything, and this is also true of companies in a crisis, which is why crisis communications begins long before an actual crisis. A company needs to systematically monitor public sentiment to detect a nascent crisis. So monitoring is the first thing in crisis communications. But what to monitor? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs? Forums? If so, which ones? And who should be doing it? And how do we record whatever we monitor? Who is to have access to the findings? A company needs to answer this sort of questions, and the way to do this is to compile a social media governance, that is to say guidelines laying down how staff should work with media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Another part of crisis preparation is a crisis manual. This provides information on who has which task within the company when a crisis strikes. A crisis manual contains processes, contact data, room numbers and telephone lines. It also provides templates for press releases adapted to crisis situations. Of course, a company needs to keep this sort of manual up to date, and it needs to make sure people read it. Who, after all, is going to spend the first few hours in a crisis reading up on what to do? And of course, preparing for a crisis takes practice, so anyone on a crisis staff should regularly participate in simulation exercises.

Lastly, in preparation for a crisis, a company needs to compile messages to ensure that its communications conform to its strategies even under exceptional circumstances. Such messages need to be examined from time to time to ensure that they still tell the story the company wants told. This takes time and effort, but as is so often the case, such time and effort pays off handsomely if the material even needs to be used only once!