Sunday, February 14, 2010

Nation's Banks or Toyota: Who Has Done A Better Job Managing Bad PR?

As we watch numerous crises unfold, be it in the banking sector, the automobile sector, the Olympics or in Sovereign nations such as Greece and Portugal, one can assess the different ways to manage a crisis.

Crisis management is one of the fundamental parts of the public relations field. It can actually be explained, quantified and understood by the lion’s share of clients and customers. It is also one of the more volatile aspects of this business.

It’s easy to point a finger at another PR professional or agency about what you might have done differently than they did in order to mitigate the circumstances that befell their client. While hindsight is always easy, a few key rules should be followed when dealing with a crisis communications moment.

The following is a brief checklist:

a) The news flow must be given out by one and only one party. There must be one spokesperson who is in charge of speaking to the press.

b) That person must be completely up to date with the unfolding situation and must be available to comment.

c) A swift and early acceptance and acknowledgment of the issues at stake is crucial. The earlier you

respond and are transparent, the better you will fare in the eyes of the press.

d) Regular scheduled briefings should and must be held in order to feed the news media. If you don’t get in front of the news, the story will get away from you.

e) If it is yours to take, take responsibility for the problem.

f) Come up with a short, medium and long term solution to deal with the problem and let your solutions be known.

g) If need be, call in independent parties to assess your solutions and to make recommendations.

h) Show your clients that you understand the gravity of the situation and are working to rebuild their trust because it matters to you.

While none of these steps will necessarily be so linear, if you look at the Toyota crisis and car recall, you can see that after initially ignoring the problem, once they focused on the enormity of it, they put these ideas into practice. It’s amazing the response that they are getting from the market.

Think of how differently they have behaved than the nation’s banks. Perhaps the banks can take a page from Toyota’s playbook for future crises which will certainly be coming down the pike. One can only hope so anyway.

[Via http://unosguardo.com]

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