All organisations face possible crises typical in their sector, e.g. airports and terrorism. How the company communicates with key stakeholders (the media/employees/investors/etc) during and after the crisis will help determine whether that crisis builds or seriously damages the company. That's why it is important to develop a crisis communications plan in advance to prepare you for every major eventuality. A good crisis communication plan allows for an honest, relevant and timely response.
How does a crisis blog help?
A crisis blog can be part of an effective crisis communications plan by projecting a human face or voice for an organisation and by providing a forum for getting specific feedback from customers. In particular it should become the first port of call for anyone seeking information on the crisis.
It is set up to store content such as news releases based around likely crises the company might have to face, leaving gaps for relevant details. It sits on a company’s server but is not accessible to the general public until required. In an emergency, the blog can become live in minutes to provide information to the media, investors, families and employees in a timely way.
What do I need to do first?
Online media monitoring and blogger outreach
• A crisis blog should always be underpinned by a robust media monitoring system: listing keywords, identifying the key online influencers in the relevant category and ongoing tracking of their online conversations
• Build and maintain relationships with the influential bloggers to help you participate in/steer relevant conversations when a crisis unfolds
Assign clear responsibilities
• Describe which employees should write the blog
• Identify under what circumstances they’ll be tapped
• Create a list of staff capable of monitoring online debates
Training
Train assigned staff:
• To monitor and build a blogger outreach programme
• To understand what’s required to bring the crisis communication system online
• How to blog effectively in support of an issues management situation
How do I do this?
• Integrate the crisis blog with your wider crisis PR efforts
• Maximise visibility of all crisis content
It’s important that those looking for information related to a particular crisis are directed to the official corporate response and/or any crisis response content when released:
- Maximise visibility in organic search by setting up the blog in advance as higher blog tenure improves its ranking in Google results
- Conduct a paid search programme where you buy crisis-related keywords
- Create a large sign on the corporate homepage signposting the blog (when live)
- Make sure all content released (images, transcripts of video and audio, articles etc) contains relevant keywords so that it can easily be found and shared
- Use RSS feeds and increase inbound links to content on site
• Draft backgrounders, position statements and news releases
• Make it easy to have regular updates
• Include an event timeline - a chronology of events for a crisis can offer a useful perspective for journalists. If you have time and resources to create graphics to accompany the timeline, provide these as JPEG files for download
• Include internet links - provide links to other web sites with useful background information
• Include media contacts - a complete list of media relations contacts for your organization is vital. Offer multiple ways to contact your organization
• Mobile blogging (moblogging) and video blogging (vlogging) - consider how these might be used to vividly depict how the company can respond to a crisis (particularly in a product recall)
Summary
Once you’ve created a crisis blog, it can be brought to life at a moment’s notice, providing key stakeholders with all the information they need and ensuring that the message you want is the one that prevails online.
Worth pointing out that all data should be cut-and-pastable to save people the time and effort required to copy out all the information into their own documents.
Pretty images are all very good, but you're only a resource if you're useful!
Posted by: Mat Morrison | September 16, 2008 at 06:09 PM
Yes, good point and probably various formats and lengths as well to suit different needs.
Posted by: Natasha G | September 18, 2008 at 05:28 PM