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Crisis Response

Hannah Terzek
Nov 28, 2017
2 min read

Crisis Response is extremely important when it comes to communication crisis. There are several steps that are vital to handling crisis when it comes about.

Something to remember is acting fast. A quick, but well planned out response is necessary for handling such situations. Especially with online platforms, negative reactions can be jolted out rapidly and escalate futhermore. Your plan should be ready to handy a heavy volume in order to be effective. Duncan Gallagher from Edelman, states that 28 % of crises spread quickly, even internationally within hours, it takes an average of 21 hours before companies are able to execute a crisis response that works for the company. With quick-acting medias like social media platforms, it is important for a company to have an action plan equipped with statements and lined up tasks.

A mistake a lot of companies make is pretending negative comments or discussion around the company are not real. It is necessary to react to both positive and negative reactions to your crisis. For example, Darling Magazine got into hot water when posted a politically sensitive article that caused a lot of reaction. While most reactions were positive, some aired on the side of negative. Darling took action and instead of only responding to one side of reaction, the company handled every comment individually in a consistent voice and tone. A company's transparency is important to their audience and can eventually lead to brand evangelists for the company.

Just like how external communication is important, as is internal. Communicating with your company's employees can limit excessive wrong information being dealt out about the crisis. This can lead to one of the final steps of crisis response which is a final debriefing. What occurs during this an evaluation of the response, keep-in-the-loop communication, and an final analysis of how to be better.

These are some steps in handling a company crisis head on. What are some of your tactics that you have had to put into practice?