|
Most companies recognize that the changing media landscape must be carefully considered and leveraged as marketing and media strategies are developed. Where once traditional media helped spawn word-of-mouth, now this new media – blogs, social networking web sites, text messaging – helps to spread messages, both good and bad, almost instantaneously. While a company would obviously welcome the quick spread of positive news, the story is different when its news like the recent Yum! Brands debacle in which over a dozen rats were videotaped as they darted through a closed KFC/Taco Bell restaurant in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The video was not only featured on morning show talk shows, but a quick search of YouTube.com turns up over 50 videos of the rodents. More than 800 news stories turn up on Google.com.
In his recent article published on the Daily Dog, a daily e-newsletter targeting public relations and marketing professionals, Ed McLaughlin, VP of E-Business Strategy at SVM E-Business Solutions, cites this crisis as one example of how corporate crises can spin out of control and reach larger audiences very quickly. Because of this, he reasons, it is imperative for companies to be proactive in adding a “Digital Crisis Management Strategy” to its current crisis plan. He notes that both Yum! Brands and JetBlue, who recently came under fire for forcing passengers to wait more than nine hours on crowded airplanes during a snowstorm, “have attempted to add a digital component to their crisis management efforts…but in both cases, these efforts appear to have dawned on the companies only after the fact.” McLaughlin goes on to list six essential steps to be sure your organization is ready in case a crisis should strike.
As public relations and marketing professionals, we should not only be counseling our clients or executive teams on tactics to proactively leverage this new, interactive media landscape for marketing/PR initiatives, but it is our responsibility to help them plan ahead for future crises and devise a plan that is ready to swing into action at the first sign of a crisis. Many corporations are already monitoring blogs, message boards and other web sites for negative press, but they should have a plan in place that delineates what constitutes as an online crisis (sometimes letting the story die down is more effective than responding), as well as who will handle the digital crisis and specific action items for managing the crisis. As we all know, the key to managing a crisis is planning for one.
 |
