Houston Business Journal Column on Protecting Corporate Reputation in a Crisis

Three keys: Act fast to protect corporate reputation in a crisis

Houston Business Journal - April 21, 2006, by Petri Darby

Nearly every organization, at least once in its lifetime, will face one crisis that draws unwanted attention and hard questions from target audiences. It is never easy to be subject to such scrutiny, and in a crisis it is all too easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and the realities of being under the microscope.

In order to get through a crisis as fast as possible with the corporate reputation intact, corporate leadership and the communications team should commit to three strategic focuses:

Fix the problem
This sounds simple, but the natural tendency of companies is a knee-jerk reaction often in the form of "spin," which is just a message designed to deflect attacks but often has no substance behind it and only makes matters worse. Too often, company leaders say, "This is a public relations problem."

Most of the time, that is just not the case. If someone sues the company, it's a legal issue. If someone is hurt or killed on the job, it's a safety issue. If someone steals from the company, it's an internal controls problem.

Very few problems begin as a PR problem, and very few solutions start with just a message. Companies need to take action to deal with the true problem, whether that involves changing policy, holding individuals accountable for their actions or commissioning an independent audit of company operations.

Manage the issue
Once the immediate problem has been corrected, the company needs to demonstrate a commitment to operating under the highest of standards going forward, while ensuring that every employee buys into that vision.

For example, if the company or individual employees were accused of wrongdoing, the company may want to conduct mandatory ethics seminars, issue a new stringent code of ethics and corporate values that are displayed in visible workplace areas and have every employee sign it. The organization may want to appoint a new chief compliance officer or internal auditor who is responsible for monitoring ongoing corporate activities and ensuring full compliance.

Address perceptions
The natural instinct of many corporations is to say as little as possible or avoid comment altogether and just wait for an issue to die down. But, as some companies still find out the hard way, "no comment" is almost always taken as an admission of guilt in the public's eye. And, in a vacuum, internal audiences will come to their own conclusions, often filling in the blanks with rumor and innuendo.

When internal audiences are skeptical, the company loses some of its most important potential ambassadors. Trust levels among employees rise the closer the source is to them, so regional leadership and immediate supervisors should always be kept abreast of new information and encouraged to share important messages with their direct reports.

Ideally, companies would have direct communication channels with key constituencies -- employees, customers, community and industry leaders, elected and appointed officials and others -- to avoid reliance on the media to carry the organization's message. The company should communicate with these groups early and often -- at least three or four times more often than it would normally.

Third-party advocates also can serve as strong and more credible sources of supporting information than a company speaking on its own behalf. Testimonials from external, respected sources can hold great weight in the court of public opinion and can go a long way toward safeguarding a company or individual's public image.

In a crisis, success should not be measured according to whether media coverage is favorable or not -- although media training and prior relationships with reporters are important keys to effective media relations. When a company is in the hotseat, all the rules change. During such times, instead of expecting positive coverage, company crisis teams should work hard to address and mitigate negative messages, maximize the amount of column inches dedicated to the organization's message and try to get through the crisis in as few media cycles as possible.

Communication must be and should be managed carefully, as highlighted by the Pennsylvania mining gaffe when families were told that all of the miners had survived when in fact all but one had died. However, in a crisis the only thing company officials can be sure of is if they don't share their side of the story, someone else will.

Petri Darby is the president of darbyDarnit (www.darbyDarnit.com), a Houston public relations, marketing communications and freelance writing company.