Reputation CPR

by Tony Shelton, Shelton & Caudle, the Communication Training &  Crisis Counsel Division of Vollmer Public Relations


CPR and crisis communication have the same goal – survival.

A while back, the American Heart Association updated its guidelines for CPR.   The old guidelines were good, but the new ones emphasize the need for harder and faster chest compression to increase victims’ chances of survival.

A crisis planning and training program can be thought of as the CPR of company survival.  An important part of that program has to do with communication. Companies that want to increase the chances their reputations will survive when the worst happens must know how to communicate even quicker than before.  Also,  they have to know how people are communicating today.

Here are four steps you can take now to make sure you’re not still looking for email addresses when the world is tweeting about the downfall of your organization:

• Do a Vulnerability Analysis - Where are your weaknesses, not just in the operation, but in your reputation?   What have your customers complained about?  What are the near-misses you’ve experienced lately?  Have your competitors faced any crises?  It’s great to learn from your own experience, but it’s smart to learn from the experiences of your peers, so you don’t have to experience them firsthand.
  
  
• Test Your Internal Communication - Have you smoothed out the communication between management, operations, legal and PR?  The need for speed has always been great, but these days you have minutes, not hours, before your story is being told by others. Make sure your communication won’t come to a halt because a member of the team retired three years ago and hasn’t been replaced on the contact list.
  
  
• Get to Know Social Media -  Whether or not your company “allows” employees to engage in social media, you need to know what’s being said about you. At least start monitoring a few sites, including Twitter, YouTube, Technorati and Facebook, and set up free Google Alerts to come to your inbox.   Use the search features.  You might even discover a small complaint and be able to address it before it becomes a crisis. (Note:  Even email is going out of style.)
  
  
• Update Your Communication Training – Make sure that your crisis-communication training includes a company-specific scenario with a social media component.    You can be sure that the next real-life crisis will.   After the training, use the outcome of the practice to find any holes in the communication chain.

The basics of crisis communication remain the same:  You need to get out there fast and show the world somebody in the organization is paying attention and doing something useful to address the crisis.

What’s new is that you no longer can control the news about your company.  The best you can do is be part of the conversation.  But that’s hugely important.

It can mean the difference between surviving and not surviving when your company’s reputation starts to “flatline” in the digital world.