When Crisis Knocks On The Door~Prince Eze Ugochukwu
Nobody and no organization should under-estimate the cost of a poor reputation and poor integrity.
In whatever enterprise, engagement, circumstances, or situation, when a search of your name comes out bad, when your name trends mostly negative, then something need to be done.
Public perception serves as a signal to the underlying quality of any organization. If the perception is zero, if the perception is negative, then there is a serious problem.
It should be realized that a single issue can affect the image of an organization. Any development in the public arena, which if it continues, could have a SIGNIFICANT impact on the image of an organization must be quickly and sincerely dealt with. Such is worth paying attention to.
It is important to manage an issue well before it becomes a crisis. It is important to identify potential, emerging or actual trends, concerns and issues likely to affect an organization.
To manage an issue, an organization must have strategic communication management tools. An organization cannot sit back and wait to act. And just because you put out a message and press release does not mean people are believing your brand either.
Organizations must be able to identify, analyze, create an action, a strategy, and evaluate issues that may have significant impact on its integrity. These issues must be assigned priority of response.
Organizations must conduct risk analysis and rate those risks accordingly. Whether they are low, medium or high risk ratings. Identifying and prioritizing risks is a useful management tool, as it helps you to know where to focus your attention and the type of mitigation plans you should put in place.
People today use twitter, facebook, you-tube, instagram or similar platforms to post negative comments and images about organizations. People make defamatory remarks about organizations on air, radio, television, podcast; in traditional print media, or blogs.
Even employees and top echelons can defame their own organizations with careless comments that are either spoken or posted.
Any of these situations can cause potential loss of credibility. So sticking your head in the sand is not best practice.
Organizations need to make the right choices to ensure that people perceive them positively and authentically. First of all by delivering on their promises, and commitments, then by listening and responding to the people.
An organization must know what the people are saying about it, what topics and issues are trending, what are the preferences of the people and what competitors are up to. Many issues escalate due to non response and because an organization is not actively listening.
As they say, the customer is always right. So the people are always right. Offer them apology and a solution. Address their fundamental problems, assist and care for those directly affected by the organizations action or inaction, manage the media and other channels of communication. Centralize information flow and be clear on who is releasing information.
Finally organizations should be able to isolate the team handling its crisis. Crisis management and communication should be undertaken by an adhoc team or committee so that the crisis team can focus on the crisis at hand, while the organization's core activities goes on and not bugged down.
Prince Eze Ugochukwu writes from Abuja. Nigeria.
