Online Crisis Management

How do you use your web site newsroom to handle a major crisis?

As part of your crisis communication planning, you must acknowledge that one day someone may use the internet to create a problem for your company or organization. Often, a small problem can escalate into a PR nightmare if your organization looks weak or bullheaded in response to the “crisis.”

Your junior staff will not be in a position to handle these crises, so senior public relations counsel should be immediately engaged. However, by using a generic e-address such as news@yourfirm.com, messages can be easily reported to the assigned senior professional agency handling the crisis by your junior staff.

Entire crisis web sites are created by some companies. Others design a direct link on their homepage. Our advice is not to bury “the crisis” but rather make it easy for reporters and others to read your side of the story.

Remember, every crisis has a victim, a villain and a vindicator. Your role needs to be identified early in the process, and you must stand up to honest criticism. On the other hand, you need to refute unabashedly the misconceptions about your organization that need to be refuted– placing guilt on the true villain, if there is one.

Make sure that your online crisis presence must also make routine information available–photographs of senior management, biographical sketches, your news releases relating to the crisis, frequently asked questions and the like.

The more detailed online information about your organization’s crisis the better. The easier the information is to find the better. E-Crises are no fun, but the effort you take to tell the truth –the whole truth– and your side of the story will serve you well indeed. Finally, be sure to act quickly.

Blogging Effectively for Business Part 1

Do you know what it takes to get found in today’s world of social media? Setting up and maintaining a blog is one way to engage your customers and prospects without an overt selling message.

According to E-Marketer, by 2013, 58% of the U.S. Internet population (128 million people) will be reading blogs regularly while 17% (38 million) will have their own blogs. Getting people to read and react to your blog requires some upfront planning and long-term commitment.

You can quickly create and publish new content through a blog and allow your readers to leave comments on your content as well as garner other feedback from those reading both your post and reader comments, thus creating a vibrant loop with all parties.

Creating a blog also gives your company another chance to be found via search engines. For example, you can raise your search ranking in Google just by adding content to your blog on a regular basis. Rather than a static website where content rarely changes, adding fresh content to your blog multiplies the number of keyword phrases ultimately picked up by the major search engines.

Before you leap into blogging, remember that a blog has no expiration date. You can’t start a blog and decide after two months to stop it, because you will stop talking to your customers. Put some planning into your blog by answering these questions:

• Who is your intended audience and what topics are of most interest to them?
• Do you have the time and people to blog?
• Do you host the blog on your website or have a separate domain?
• Do you use a free blogging platform (a popular one is WordPress) or pay a monthly fee?
• Are you comfortable editing the blog templates or should you get IT or an outside firm involved?

Coming soon: How to create content and how to measure your blog’s effectiveness.

Jim DiFrangia, SBC Social Consciousness AE