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Print Edition StoriesFriday, April 17, 2009
How to handle a public relations crisis
By Keith Regan, Special to Mass High Tech
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When Apple Inc. issued a cease and desist order to Podcast Ready, claiming its company name violated its “pod” trademark, it was a potentially crippling crisis for the startup.
“It could have been decimating for the company if they had needed to pull back from the use of that term,” says Tony Sapienza, a principal at Woburn-based Topaz Partners, the Texas-based startup’s public relations firm.
Instead, Topaz helped Podcast Ready use blogs and other social media to quickly get in front of the story. The move not only helped tilt public opinion in the firm’s favor by mobilizing the bloggers and podcasters who use the company’s products, but helped raise awareness of the company in the process.
“The podcasting community rose up in opposition and created a lot of buzz that this was just not right,” Sapienza says. “It turned a crisis that could have put a lock on the company’s growth into an opportunity to open the company’s visibility up to a larger audience.”
At some point, nearly every company faces a public relations crisis of some scale. While the rise of social media such as blogs presents new challenges and opportunities alike, the basic rules for handling crises haven’t changed.
“The single best way to survive a crisis is to prepare for one,” said Hugh Drummond, vice president at Boston government affairs and PR firm O’Neill and Associates. “This includes identifying a crisis team, centralizing crisis decision making, training employees and practicing your plan.”
If anything, says Colleen Beauregard, general manager of the Boston office of communications firm Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, shorter news cycles make planning ahead for a crisis even more critical.
“It used to be that in crisis communications you had 24 hours to start to see how a story was playing and now you have 24 seconds,” she said. Crisis planning, often done with an outside communications firm, can help put a basic framework in place so that a business is ready to act regardless of the specific issue that arises.
“There really aren’t any new public relations problems, so if a company is honest and steps back and assesses its risks, it can be pretty well prepared.”
A shorter news cycle not only requires faster responses but also a sophisticated way to monitor how news is portrayed in the media. A business can use feedback analysis to judge how well its message is getting out and look for ways to improve how it’s responding.
“Be swift,” Drummond said. “Journalists need information quickly, and if they don’t get it from you, they’ll get it from a less reliable source.”
In many ways, a public relations crisis — even a perceived crisis — can be more damaging than some physical threats, says Fern Reis, CEO of Newton-based branding and communications firm Expertizing. “A company can often recover more easily from a physical emergency like a hard drive crash or a fire,” she said.
She said the reason small issues spin out of control is that “public relations emergencies are seldom considered until they’ve happened and by then it’s usually too late for a business to do an effective job of planning for them and dealing strategically with them.”
Planning ahead also gives a business more of a chance to turn a crisis positive. Beauregard says as with crisis management in general, crisis communications often comes down to leadership.
A poor response to a crisis can compound the problem, making any future responses even more challenging. The most common public relationsmistake companies make in crisis response is failing to be completely transparent with employees, customers, and the public, according to Ed Cafasso, senior vice president of communications firm MS&L Boston.
“It sounds cliché but honesty is the best policy,” said Cafasso.
The second mistake, said Cafasso, is taking employees for granted and not recognizing them as the company’s best brand ambassadors. The third mistake takes place after the crisis when the company fails to fix the problem that led to that crisis.
“It is important to let the stakeholders know that you identified the origin of the crisis and you are taking steps to fix it so it doesn’t happen again,” said Cafasso.
Quick tips
• Prepare for a crisis long before it happens.
• Honesty is still the best policy.
• Fix the problem behind the crisis, and communicate with stakeholders.
Keith Regan is a freelance writer in Grafton.
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