What is crisis communication? Process of handling crisis communication

In the context of the rapidly developing 4.0 technology, the emergence of social media has been giving businesses certain advantages. However, it is also this rapid spread that has led to many communication crises. So what is a media crisis? How to recognize and handle it? Take a look at the article below!

Communication crisis concept

Communication crises are emergencies or threatening situations beyond the control of the subject. This incident affects the operation and reputation of a certain business, organization or individual.

It is considered an event of spreading information in a negative direction towards a certain subject or objects related to the crisis issue. These events are often caused by the interest of the press when reporting unfavorable or negative information related to the business.

How to recognize a media crisis?

The internet is considered a "double-edged sword" that opens up opportunities for business development and can also drag that growth down. Therefore, businesses must know the signs of crisis to quickly handle.

It would be great if your business received positive feedback from customers for the business.

However, if you do not promptly handle negative reviews that adversely affect your brand image, there will be unpredictable consequences. Therefore, you need to clearly define the benefits and harms of social networks.

To recognize a media crisis quickly, businesses need to have a staff capable of using Digital Marketing tools. With this tool, the optimized search content will be tightly controlled easily.

If crisis signs appear, Digital Marketing will promptly handle and promote positive images and news about the business to the public. In addition, it is necessary to regularly update information to take timely measures when a crisis is detected.

Effective crisis communication process for businesses

Step 1: Build a professional media crisis management team

To own the optimal communication customer processing process, the first step is to build yourself a team of professional processing staff. Each department in this team will be divided into different tasks and tasks. At the same time, those involved in the assigned work will coordinate with the business to find out the causes and solutions to handle the crisis as quickly as possible.

Step 2: Conduct cooperation with press and media parties

The next step in the media crisis handling process is to contact and cooperate with the press to easily reach customers. This is an effective way to help businesses defuse negative reviews and feedback from customers. Always ensure that all information you provide is accurate and avoid shocking statements that aggravate the crisis.

Step 3: Prevent negative information when a crisis occurs

The speed of spread of the internet is extremely high, so to contain and prevent a crisis you need to quickly and neatly handle the source of negative information before things become out of control. Find an ally or partner with you to put in place the right communication crisis process.

It can be an individual, business or organization with a large voice and influence in the industry to soften the impact of public opinion. This step is essential and you need to pay attention to in the crisis communication process.

Step 4: Use consistent language and actions

In order for the public to recognize and see the business's concern for the crisis, the next thing to do in the crisis communication process is to use consistent language or actions. Because every word and action right now is the basis to demonstrate the crisis you are facing.

Make sure your business needs to handle the crisis in sync. From speech to actions, gestures should not use round words, avoiding the media and the public.

Step 5: Put the interests of customers and the community first

Communication crisis will definitely leave businesses with unfortunate consequences. However, the rate and degree of high or low damage caused by the crisis depends a lot on how that business handles it.

For optimal crisis handling, in this step you need to put the interests of your community and customers first. This is how you protect and preserve your image and brand in the minds of your customers.

Step 6: Conduct crisis recovery

“Every mistake has a fix,” and so do all crises. After termination, the business needs to carry out recovery.

For a speedy recovery, you'll first need to get together with company leadership and crisis management to review and assess the impact the crisis has had on your business. Thereby planning appropriate communication activities and bringing the business back to stability.

At the same time, cooperate with the Marketing department to restore the image and communication orientation for your business. In addition, businesses also need to check and evaluate the prevention of risks caused by the crisis to draw valuable lessons for themselves.

Effective ways to handle a media crisis

To handle communication crises effectively, you should follow the guidelines below.

Examine the causes of the media crisis

As soon as signs of a crisis appear, you need to conduct an approach, review and assessment of the cause of the crisis in the shortest possible time.

To be able to see the media crisis in the most effective and intuitive way, you can ask and answer questions such as:

How does this issue affect the reputation and level of credibility of the business?

Does this issue have any effect on the high-level apparatus of the enterprise?

How serious is the crisis facing the business?

Honesty with the media

When a crisis occurs, what you should not do is hide or be unclear from the media. The best way to reassure your customers and receive sympathy from the public is to apologize, clearly state the problems the business is facing, and offer solutions. reasonable settlement.

Receive customer feedback

After confirming the cause of the communication crisis, businesses need to receive feedback from customers and partners to quickly answer all their questions. When a crisis occurs, the speed of response is crucial to the positive transformation of the crisis.

If you remain silent and passive in all situations, the customer will immediately complain and become angry. You need to estimate the right response time to make the customer feel that you really care about their problem.

Press Release

When a large business faces a media crisis, that's when journalists begin to "make headlines" and "hunt for news". Therefore, instead of avoiding the press, businesses should directly face public opinion and interviews.

This is considered the best way to calm public opinion. If possible, you should hold a press conference to answer all questions from journalists directly. However, you must prepare your answer carefully to avoid making the problem worse.

Use the law to handle

In many cases, businesses will have to rely on the law to handle the communication crisis quickly. Because the public often tends to believe in the law and enforce it properly.

When using the law, enterprises will have to disclose to the public their business methods. And this is not what any business wants to do. Therefore, businesses need to research, think and consider carefully before making a decision to use this method to handle the crisis.

Communication crisis is always a big concern of most businesses today because it has great negative effects on business operations and brand development. Hopefully, through the useful information in the article Bizfly shares, you have grasped the important content so that you can quickly handle the crisis to avoid the consequences.

Some basic principles in handling crisis communication

In the process of operating in the market, enterprises cannot avoid communication crises. However, not all businesses know how to handle and solve it satisfactorily.

Here are some suggestions to help businesses avoid mistakes in handling media crises and maintain their brand.

Some basic principles of crisis management are:

1. Determine the magnitude and extent of the crisis

2. Identify the cause of the crisis

3. Establish a combat committee (preferably set up before) consisting of the General Director and directly related departments.

4. Identify the spokesperson, the direction of the spokesman, the amount of information emitted and strictly comply with this.

5. Deal with the problem with the people involved right at the root. At the same time, give convincing evidence of the authorities.

6. Utilize all contacts with the company's own press and the media company's crisis management consulting company. Enlist the support of consumers and the public (for example, if Viettel is attacked because of poor signal quality, it can immediately mobilize the testimonials of millions of consumers, if HSBC is criticized for its quality serving, can immediately interview thousands of customers; Red bear noodles instead of "burning" 77 billion in advertising and a little investment in PR, so that customers with the company visit and help the children, If you put more money in each package of noodles, creating a strong wave of support online, things could have been different,...)

7. Use online tools to increase the amount of positive news, dilute the negative information to push the bad news far down in the google search results table.

8. Ensure transparent communication internally and with the press.

Should not:

1. Winding, denying responsibility, pushing responsibility.

2. Behave on money.

3. Anger, unbridled speech and actions.

4. Inconsistent speech and actions.

5. Delete articles (automatic search engines work continuously and delete articles prove that the business is hiding something, this further stimulates journalists and opponents to dig deeper and research).

Key word: