Crisis Communications Plan: Necessary evil or waste of time?

For most of the past 2 months, BP has been bombarded by negative press regarding the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Imagine working in PR or communications at a company where everyone can see a live feed of oil gushing into the ocean and images of birds and other wildlife coated with oil.

You would assume that they had a crisis communications plan in place before this happened but I wouldn't blame you for thinking that this was not the case or question how much thought was put into it. I know much has been written about how BP has responded to this crisis and I'm certain it will become a case study for many PR, communications and crisis management courses in the future.

However, this blog post is not about BP or the disaster in the Gulf but it's about the question of whether a crisis communications plan for a start-up is a necessary evil or a waste of time. It's easy to dismiss the need for a crisis communications plan when you assume that your start-up will not face a disaster on the scale of BP but that would be missing the point.

A crisis does not need to be on such a large scale for it to affect your brand and your sales. For example, last week an iPad security breach that unveiled 100K+ email addresses was discovered and received a lot of publicity. This negative PR will affect AT&T, and maybe even Apple, not on a large scale but it will still have an impact and a plan needed to be implemented to respond to that crisis.

These are just 2 examples of crises that have happened recently that differ in scope but both required an immediate response. And that's the thing with a crisis, you don't have time to plan your response after the crisis happens. You need to respond immediately or the negative publicity could spiral out of control in this new age of social media.

If something bad happens to your company, you need to tell your side of the story before everyone else does it for you. That's why it's best to think through your response, or if you won't respond, in advance of the crisis and also to lay the groundwork needed to communication this response to your different stakeholders.

So while, your start-up has a thousand things to do on any given day, unfortunately, you need to add the development of a crisis communications plan to the list. Now this may not be at the top of your list but it has to be there. In some cases, it may even need to be at the top if you're making a controversial announcement for example. I'll talk more about how you can develop this crisis communications plan quickly in an upcoming blog post.

The plan doesn't need to be long and detailed but you do need to think about what negative things could happen to or be said about your brand and have a way to respond quickly so that all your audiences hear your side of the story.

Is there a crisis communications plan in place for your company?

Comments

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It's very well worth spending time preparing a crisis communications plan but it needs to be flexible as no plan can ever cover every eventuality.

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[ClubPenguinCheats]

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