What do you do after a social media and PR crisis?

Image by coreycam via Flickr

You weathered the crisis. You’re exhausted, but at least you lived through it. Yesterday, I wrote about how to be prepared for a PR crisis with social media, but for many companies, that advice will come too late. Unfortunately, it’s human nature for us to ignore things (such as getting prepared for a crisis) until after we are hit with the crisis. It always feels like we can put that task off in favor of more urgent matters, but eventually the crisis comes and are caught unprepared. So, if you’ve just weathered such a PR crisis, what do you do now? OK, I mean after you get some sleep.

The first thing you should do, post-crisis, is to conduct the dreadfully named post-mortem. What went right? What went wrong? What do you wish you had already in place before the crisis, that would have made life so much easier? As painful as it is, it’s critical that you examine everything that happened while it is fresh in your mind. I once heard someone say, “Write it down while it is still true.” Too often, we think we’ll remember, but time dims our memories and changes the stories we tell ourselves. Don’t miss your chance to really identify the successes and failures of how you handled the crisis, so you can learn from them.
The next step is the hardest. You must immediately take the steps to prepare for the next crisis. Everything you wished was in place for this crisis? Put them in place now for the next one. If you wish that your Twitter presence had a bigger following, take the steps to attract followers now. If you wish you had a list of all the blogs that might talk about your industry, don’t wait to put it together. If you realized you need listening services to stay on top of what people are saying, now is the time to address that.
The last step is the most unexpected for some people. You need to accept the painful fact that the crisis is not really over. Everything said about you stays on the Internet forever and Google makes that information a click away from the right search. Some people making decisions about who to buy from will come across that bad PR years after the events have played out, so you must make sure that your story of how the crisis was resolved gets the attention of searchers. Perhaps that requires work in organic search, but you might even pay for paid search ads that show your side of the story. Just because the media has moved on doesn’t mean the story can’t continue to do damage.
Remember the sage advice to never let a crisis pass without taking advantage. This is the moment when your colleagues are most ready to do what it takes and when your execs are most likely to pony up the money. You just had a near-death experience and you don’t want to repeat it. Take these steps now to be ready for the next crisis–you never know when it is coming.

This entry was posted on March 18, 2010 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.