How to survive a public relations crisis

Lucille Keen
Nov 1 2016
AFR
The clock is ticking. Twitter is in meltdown and journalists are calling repeatedly. Your organisation is minutes from plummeting into a community crisis and human lives are at stake.
A new Hollywood blockbuster set in your city is about to be released but a flurry of tweets suggest the local community mistakenly believes the disaster movie is real.
News reports start to appear which claim the city’s earthquake monitor has been activated and social media commentary begins to turn hysterical. Your city government’s communications team finds itself under siege with interview requests from journalists. Translators need to be found to interpret breaking news clips from international radio and television stations.
Ten minutes later, reports emerge the earthquake app has been hacked by cyber criminals and your communications team has to scramble to respond to a deluge of media questions about the latest claims.
For eight communications directors holed up in an office in Melbourne this is not a normal training session; there is no time to doze off at the back of the room because they are in the midst of a PR crisis.
“We promise to give you the worst day of your professional life,” Engage ORM founder and public relations disaster analyst Gerry McCusker says.
Simulated crisis
A recent global survey by Deloitte found less than half of the board directors surveyed had playbooks for likely crisis scenarios and only one third engaged in crisis simulation or training. SenateSHJ surveyed executives across Australia and New Zealand in April and found only half had a budget for reputation management or were planning to invest in crisis simulation training.
“Every Australian corporation should now be asking whether their board and executive team is prepared for a crisis and whether they have made the time for planning, simulations and thinking about reputational risk issues,” says Craig Badings, partner at SenateSHJ. He said SenateSHJ research found executives believed there had been an increase in the risks affecting reputation in the past three years but in that period reputation has become harder to manage.
Engage ORM runs drills for communications experts and company executives that simulate a crisis in real time. “This is reputational management on crack,” McCusker says. “You can’t play football just from reading a book, so you can’t know how to respond and know the pressures until you’re in that crisis situation.”
The simulated drill would ring all too true for the board and executives of Dreamworld’s Ardent Leisure who botched their response to last month’s horrific accident that caused the deaths of four people when a raft flipped on a water ride at the Gold Coast theme park.
At Samsung, the tech giant’s well-orchestrated release of a new phone turned to disaster with the news that it was bursting into flames.
Crown Resorts is another high-profile company that has been on the back foot dealing with the fallout from the arrest of 18 employees including three top Australian executives in China.
Public relations disasters cost Australian companies billions each year. Hundreds of millions of dollars can be wiped off a company’s share price within hours.
Ardent Leisure’s share price plummeted 22 per cent the day after its accident and the CEO, Deborah Thomas, told investors the event would affect earnings over the coming year. It may take years to rebuild its reputation.
The response of the board and management of Ardent, including chairman Neil Balnaves and chief executive Deborah Thomas, revealed a failure to prepare for a catastrophic but imaginable scenario.

Fronting the media
This contrasts sharply with BHP’s response after a mudslide at a BHP Billiton joint venture in Brazil wiped out an entire village and killed 19 people last year. Chief executive Andrew Mackenzie was commended for immediately fronting the media, apologising to the families affected and flying to the scene of the disaster.
“Most organisations haven’t configured a media plan to cope with a 24-hour newsroom and social media,” McCusker says.
The problem, McCusker says, is that companies generally don’t get to practise how to deal with a crisis.
As the simulation unfolds in Melbourne, the participants discover there is no time for meetings and workshops. Members of the group say the biggest time challenge in a real crisis would be gaining executive approval and sign-off on how to respond to the media.
The first thing an organisation can do after an event is to acknowledge it and have some approved responses ready to go, says McCusker. Another time saver is to have clearly established approval pathways through the organisation, so communications teams can respond quickly to the changing situation.
Respond with empathy
If possible, get the chief executive to respond with empathy to the event.
Following the crash of an AirAsia plane in December 2014, the airline’s boss Tony Fernandes tweeted updates about the recovery efforts and expressed his concern for the victims’ families. “To all my staff stay strong,” he tweeted in the days following the disaster.
Video is a powerful tool, says McCusker, and conveys emotion better than type.
After the first response, an organisation needs to maintain control of the narrative by communicating even when there’s little to report. If the authorities limit what you can do or say, tell the public that this is happening.
A key take-away from the Engage ORM simulation is that companies need to have publishing expertise as a core part of their business so that crisis responses can be fed into established channels of communication.
At the end of the simulation one participant admits, “It was actually quite confronting and exhausting”.
McCusker agrees, but points out at least everyone gets to go home with their company share price intact.