Building Trust through Effective Crisis Management

Building Trust through Effective Crisis Management as explained by Timothy Coombs, Ph.D at the International PR Summit – November 2018, Bali.

Wwith crisis communication, no matter where you’re at, your priority has to be on any victims of the crisis. Was anyone injured in various ways? Was anyone killed? You need to address those victim concerns. You don’t do that first, nothing else you say will really matter because people aren’t going to listen to the rest of what you say. What about the victims? What about the other people? And you see with organization, when BP had the incident in the Gulf of Mexico, all they talked about was how much money they were losing, and not about the victims. People were losing their livelihoods for a time. Whether it’s at a resort, where people weren’t going to go or shrimpers who can’t shrimp anymore. That’s really problematic. So if you always focus on the victims in your messaging, that should hold across cultures because that’s just a human trait. What about the people involved in the crisis? You always have to focus on that part of it first.

When we think about crisis and crisis communication, we think “Ohh we’re just reacting.” Well you’re not just reacting, you’re still strategic. And you say what are my objectives coming out of. So if you think about a crisis as a story starts to unfold, and as this story unfolds, as an organization, even for the stakeholders, that’s negative things are happening to both groups. If it’s a product recall, people might be hurt by the product organization, you’re damaging your reputation, you’re losing money. So the key is to end that story as soon as possible, what you want to do for it. When you think along those lines, some of the indicators you would look at is media coverage. Is media coverage dropping off? Because ideally, that’s what you want to do. You want to move out of the media, and ideally as you move out of the media, the media coverage, the sentiment changes, from negative to at least neutral, and maybe even positive. But in most cases, you want to come and drop the negative. And nowadays we see the same trend, you want to do that in the digital world. Looking at how the discussion is going on about your organization and your crisis in various social media platforms. Again you would hope that it would start to drop off and not only drop off but move from negative to less negative to neutral or maybe even to positive. Those are some key indicators that organizations need to look at when they’re talking about the effectiveness of their crisis communication. Another one would be that you really were able to contain the damage and by damage I mean the risk to your stakeholders by closing that story, you also made it safer for them so you’re able to take say hazardous chemicals and take care of that quickly so you protected the stakeholder or get your product off the market very quickly to protect the stakeholders. That would be another type of valuation that would have harder to pinpoint but you want to show how quickly you acted to make sure that there’s no problem with your stakeholders and the risk has been reduced for them.

People get obsessed with when negative comments come out about an organization in the digital world and it’s so funny because you’re thinking here are these CEO’s in upper management with all these experiences and they’re acting like teenagers like “ohh someone said something bad about me” and said well it’s not the end of the world. If it starts to escalate, that I’ve got to take action. That’s the biggest risk you have is you overreact to kind of a first statement about something, you have to wait and see. As an organization, if you expect everyone all the time say nice things about you, you’ve got a rough life. You’ve got to accept and that’s what organizations do. You track and you look at your sentiment. Where are you at and track that over time. It’s when there’s this big shift in sentiment and for organizations when it shifts negative,  that’s when you kind of have to look at it said “Now they need to take some action.” But you know blip here there, you don’t worry about it. You have to look for trends, and that’s that goes all the way back to kind of early days with issue management. The idea that we really need to scan the environment and you have to find trends, not just individual things and that’s where it’s tough because you have to sort through what’s good, what’s important and what’s not. That’s a challenge but don’t worry about everything, that’s negative out there.