By Jonathan Bernstein
All businesses are vulnerable to crises. You can't serve any population without
being subjected to situations involving lawsuits, accusations of impropriety,
sudden changes in company ownership or management and other volatile situations
on which your audiences—and the media that serves them—often focus.
The cheapest way to turn experience into future profits is to learn from others' mistakes. With that in mind, the following examples of inappropriate crisis communication policies, culled from real-life situations, will provide a tongue-in-cheek guide on what not to do when your organization faces a crisis.
To ensure that your crisis will flourish and grow, you should
1. Play ostrich. Hope that no one learns about it. Cater to
whoever is advising you to say nothing, do nothing. Assume you'll have time
to react when and if necessary, with little or no preparation time. And while
you're playing ostrich, with your head buried firmly in the sand, don't think
about the part that's still hanging out.
2. Only start work on a potential crisis situation after it's public.
This is closely related to Item 1, of course. Even if you have decided you won't
play ostrich, you can still foster your developing crisis by deciding not to
do any advance preparation. Before the situation becomes public, you still have
some proactive options available.
You could, for example, thrash out and even test some planned key messages, but that would probably mean that you will communicate promptly and credibly when the crisis breaks publicly, and you don't want to do that, do you? So, to allow your crisis to gain a strong foothold in the public's mind, make sure you address all issues from a defensive posture—something much easier to do when you don't plan ahead. Shoot from the hip, and give off-the-cuff, unrehearsed remarks.
3. Let your reputation speak for you. "Doesn't anybody
know how important we think we are?" you complain. You: big business Goliath.
Me: member of public who doesn't trust big business. You lose.
4. Treat the media like the enemy. By all means, tell a reporter
that you think he or she has done such a bad job of reporting on you, and that
you'll never talk to him or her again. Or badmouth him or her in a public forum.
Send nasty faxes. Then sit back and have a good time while
5. Get stuck in reaction mode versus being proactive. A negative
story quoting various sources suddenly breaks about your organization, quoting
various sources. You respond with a statement. There's a follow-up story. You
make another statement. Suddenly you have a public debate, a lose/lose situation.
Good work! Instead of looking at methods that could turn the situation into
one where you initiate activity that precipitates news coverage, putting you
in the driver's seat and letting others react to what you say, you continue
to look as if you're the guilty party defending yourself.
6. Use language your audience doesn't understand. Jargon and
arcane acronyms are but two of the ways you can be sure to confuse your audiences
and a surefire way to make most crises worse. Let's check out a few of these
taken-from-real-situations gems:
To the average member of the public, and to most of the media who serve them,
the general reaction to such statements is "Huh?"
7. Assume that truth will triumph over all. You have the facts
on your side and you know the American public will eventually come around and
realize that. Disregard the proven concept that perception is as damaging as
reality—sometimes more so.
8. Address only issues and ignore feelings.
So what if people are scared? Angry? You're a businessman, not a psychologist—right?
9. Make only written statements. Face it, it's a lot easier
to communicate via written statements only. No fear of looking or sounding foolish.
Less chance of being misquoted. Sure, it's impersonal and some people think
it means you're hiding and afraid, but you know they're wrong and that's what's
important.
10. Use "best guess" methods of assessing damage.
"Oh my goodness, we're the front page (negative) story, we're ruined!"
Congratulations, you may have just made a mountain out of a molehill.... OK,
maybe you only made a small building out of a molehill. Helpful hint: You can
make the situation worse by refusing to spend a little time or money quietly
surveying your most important audiences to see what they think and if it matches
the perception created by the media.
11. Do the Same Thing Over and Over Again Expecting Different Results.
The last time you had negative news coverage you just ignored media calls, perhaps
at the advice of legal counsel or simply because you felt that no matter what
you said, the media would get it wrong. The result was a lot of concern amongst
all of your audiences, internal and external, and the aftermath took quite a
while to fade away.
So, the next time you have a crisis, you're going to do the same thing, right?
Because "stuff happens" and you can't improve the situation by attempting
to improve communication—can you?
Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein
Crisis Management LLC , and author of "Keeping the Wolves at Bay:
A Media Training Manual." He has more than 20 years of experience in
all aspects of crisis management: prevention, planning, testing and response.
To contact him, write to jonathan@bernsteincrisismanagement.com.
Reprinted with permission of Bernstein Crisis Management LLC.