Have you ever been in a public relations crisis so big you don’t know how to manage it? Then afterwards, you sit and think, ‘how could I have prevented this from blowing up in the first place?’
First, let’s define what exactly a public relations crisis is. According to Talkwalker, a PR crisis is when an organization or an individual receives negative, humiliating, and damaging publicity.
You’ve seen a PR crisis before, haven’t you? Here’s a perfect example: remember when the clothing brand, H&M, tried to sell this:
For those who don’t remember, H&M launched a line of sweatshirts in 2018 that were found offensive due to their racist marketing photos. Images included a young white model wearing a sweater that read ‘Mangrove Jungle Survival Expert’. The other image was of a young African American model who’s sweater read ‘Coolest Monkey In The Jungle.’ This caused an uproar of anger and animosity from not only their audience, but the models’ parents as well.
It’s nearly impossible to prevent a public relations crisis like this one from blowing up in your face. However, here at our agency, we have provided 3 ways in which you can prevent a crisis from happening in the first place.
Always Plan Ahead
It’s never a bad idea to plan for the worst case scenario when you or your company are about to post content. Being a step ahead of everything can also prevent you from wasting any time when a crisis should arise. Be sure to stay calm and level headed when dealing with a crisis by sending human responses to your audiences in order to really empathize for them during those troubling times.
Create a Crisis Response Team
Building a crisis response team is the perfect way to manage your pr crisis before it even happens. By having multiple people working together, they can reach a further audience. Also, make the team diverse. Your audience will be different races, ages, genders, and have different perspectives. Having a diverse team can help be more relatable to your audience as well.
Create a Crisis Plan
This is a perfect way to discuss how a crisis could potentially happen when sitting down with your team to create your plan. Creating a dummy plan with your crisis response team is a great way to practice what to do, how to respond, and who to contact when that crisis happens.
Post-crises can be a bit scary to get through since you are being watched and talked about almost daily. It may even feel like you’re under a microscope and any wrong move can hurt you and your company. However, a crisis is also a learning experience from tackling issues, improving the company’s operations to overall avoiding future crises.
To learn more about prevention tips from our public relations agency, click here.
