Brand Central Station

Nobody ever likes to think about what they’ll do when things go wrong.  As corporate marketers, a big piece of your job is to make sure things go right.  So, what are you doing to make sure a crisis doesn’t permanently derail your company?

Crisis PR gurus, Deon Binneman and Ned Barnett addressed this in a recen exchange on the PRMindshare Forum.  Deon is from Johannesburg, South Africa has been in the “Reputation Management” business for years and specializes in helping businesses deal with problems tht get out of hand.  (Check out Deon’s blog.)  Ned lives in Las Vegas and has spent years helping clients in healthcare and technology deal with the unexpected.  (Check out Ned’s web site.)

What it boils down to is this – dealing with the unexpected can be expensive and most companies can not afford to have people on staff 24/7 to do it.  Instead, the smart money is spent on planning ad creating a rapid response team that can implement that plan when needed.

According to Deon and Ned, here are some of the organizational and cost factors to keep in mind:

1. The first phase is a comprehensive site evaluation; an in-depth discovery session sometimes lasting as much as a couple of days.

2. Following the audit and interviews, an outside PR pro will develop a crisis plan – either general or specific, based on the identified needs of the client.

3. A key step in comprehensive crisis planning involves the outside consultant returning to the client’s location to present the plan and walk it through the approval process.

4. While a good bit of the plan can be implemented with internal first responders, most PR consultants will als be involved in helping their client implement the plan – this is a widely variable action as different clients have different needs, resources, etc. 

5. Once the plan is in place, most PR consultants will receive a small monthly retainer to be “on call” and to keep up with the changing needs. Depending on the size of the retainer, some consultants will make a site visit once a year, twice a year or quarterly to assess the environment and submit updates to the plan as needed.

6. The bulk of the retainer is to pay the consultant (or consultancy) to stay up-to-speed so if a crisis breaks, the consultant drops everything and rushes in to help manage the crisis.

7. Keep this in mnd: when a crisis breaks, most consultants operate on an hourly basis.  A typical arrangement is for a consultantto charge 1.5x the normal hourly for week-days and 2x normal hourly for weekends and holidays.  If you can negotiate it, it’s better to pay for crisis management time on a day rate rather than by the hour (crisis situations can rack up a lot of hours in a hurry). 

8. Be sure the PR consultant commits to managing a crisis situation on-site – “remote” crisis management has limits.

So, what constitutes a “crisis”?  It’s not all exploding buildings and earthquakes as Bissett Matheson Communication’s Duncan Matheson points out: “People involved in crisis management spend too much time focusing on the potential exploding type crisis, when statistics tracked over well more than a decade now show that exploding crisis have become very much the exception.”

“The much more common type of crisis is the building crisis – the one management should have seen coming, but because of action or inaction, mismanaged.  This is the more common type (and) is potentially just as devistating.” Duncan points to the most recent report from the Institute for Crisis Management as a reference for building (or smouldering) crisis.

The key take-away here:  Be prepared and work with an objective consultant (or team) who can help you spot the building crisis – not just attempt to expect the unexpected.

Do me a favor, would you?  Give it a few minutes and post a list of one to five “building” crisis in your organization.  I think we’ll be surprized to find that most of them fit within five to ten general categories. I’ll update this post based on the response to this and other requests posted to the discussion boards/forums I follow. 

Thanks in advance.