“Uh-Oh, Now What Do I Do???”–Dealing With a Crisis.

We all face some sort of crisis in our lifetime–some more major than others. Some of us face these crises privately, while others’ are blasted all over every news medium. Regardless of your situation, there are several ways to help ease your crisis situation without further ruining your reputation.

I am currently taking a PR Planning class where we work on mock cases (most of them are real case studies that our professor was involved in when he practiced PR). Our cases range from planning events to creating plans to help solve crisis situations. Our current case involves a crisis situation in which a high-school is facing racism issues after a white non-student assaulted an African-American student on campus. After the altercation, racism-fueled violence ensued causing a riot of 1000 students on campus. Our task for this case is to create an immediate crisis plan to deal with the situation and avert further violence and racial issues. I won’t go into detail about how we plan to execute our immediate crisis plan, but I will give some guidelines that we are following that can be applied to all post-crisis plans. 

I read a blog post by Kel Kelly that gives great advice on how to deal with crisis situation. In her post, talks about an NBC Nightly News report about a bailed-out bank sponsoring a meeting at a high-end resort in Vegas. Obviously, with their current financial situation, these banks were being just plain stupid. However, there is time to try and recover from their dumb mistakes. Kelly lists five steps to handle the situation:

1. Assess
2. Take Responsibility
3. Identify Changes and Open Channels of Communication
4. Tell Top-Talent to Screw
5. Pray

It’s important for a person or a company to first take a step back and make sure that they are indeed responsible for the incident, and whether they need to take action. If they are responsible, it’s important for them to do something about it. In light of this week’s Chris Brown and Rihanna mess, it would have been a good idea for Chris Brown’s publicist to address this issue in a timely matter before his problems got worse (Chris Brown didn’t issue a statement until a full week after the alleged assault, after his contract with Wrigley’s Gum was suspended, and after some radio stationsbanned his music). The next step is to make sure this occurrence never happens again. This is what we are doing in my Planning class–we want to make sure that racial violence does not occur again at the school, and that faculty and staff are trained to handle these situations if a problem starts to arise. Kelly suggests that the person or organization makes their plan of action visible to anyone and everyone via a Web 2.0 platform. Make sure everyone knows you are doing your part to clean up your mess! Her next tip, “Tell Top-Talent to Screw,” is referring to the banking incident, but can be applied to other situations. If people are telling you or your company to do something that you know you shouldn’t be doing: DON’T DO IT! It could hurt your reputation. Instead, offer other suggestions to appeal to your “top talent” but that don’t put you or your company in the hole. And finally, have hope that this all works. Most PR Professionals say that you can never go back to “normal” after a crisis. However, if you follow these steps, and try to reform your image, you may have a good chance of gaining your client’s and the public’s trust again. 

(Photo: Brittney Bush)

(Photo: World Economic Forum)