 Experts regularly say that in crisis situations like a house fire, drowning, things like that, that more people die from panic and not having a clear idea of what to do and how to respond than they do from the actual event itself, from the actual fire, the actual drowning situation, but the panic causes more deaths in crisis situations than anything else. I want to suggest to you that the same thing is true for organizations, which is why we want to focus in this video on crisis communication. What we can do in those situations as public relations professionals and the important role that PR plays in helping to manage those crisis situations for organizations. So let's start off by defining what we mean by crisis communication. Well, crisis communication is when you have a significant threat to operations that can have long-term negative consequences to the company or organization involved. So a significant threat to operations that can have long-term negative consequences to the company or organization involved. In a previous video we talked about issue management and we talked about how issue management is really proactive, but crisis communication is actually reactive. Issue management, we want to get ahead of things, we want to keep an eye on things and and try and stay ahead of issues before they crop up. Crisis management, crisis communication, we're already in the midst of things. This is not something that we could have or that we did not then predict and so something has happened. So now we're reacting in the situation in crisis management, in crisis communication. So as PR people it's important to differentiate between those two things as well. So another thing we want to talk about is the difference between a disaster, a problem and a crisis. A disaster is something that when sometimes we throw the word natural in front of it, like a natural disaster, flooding, blizzards, fire, drought, tornadoes, things like that are things that we can't really control. To a certain extent as an organization we don't have a lot of control in those situations. So and those are things that often involve a much more coordinated response maybe from government agencies, maybe from the National Guard, maybe from other organizations as well. They don't just affect us, they affect our entire community. It still affects our organization, but it's not something that we're necessarily responsible for or could have predicted in that sense. So that's a disaster, it's something in and of itself. A problem is more what we would refer to as kind of a bump in the road. A problem is not a significant issue. It's not that long-term negative consequence that we talked about that a crisis would be, but it's still something that needs our attention. And so we need to be aware of problems, but not every problem is a crisis. Every crisis is probably a problem, but not every problem is a crisis and doesn't need to be treated as all hands on deck. This is a crisis. Problems a lot of times we can handle in a much smaller way and a much quieter way. So they're more of a bump in the road than falling off a cliff here somewhere. But again, a crisis is a significant threat to operations that can have long-term negative consequences to the company or organization involved. So we're looking at something that's larger than a problem. Typically larger than a problem, it's going to have a long-term negative consequences. It is something that could have been, if not avoided, then is something that is within our control to kind of manage and or at least to divert or dilute the impact of that crisis. Unlike a disaster, again, it's largely out of our hands. Crisis is something that is directly connected with our organization or company and something that we can have more influence over and impact on both the resolution and the way that it's handled, the way that it's communicated. Okay. So there are a couple of different types of crises, right? The different types of crisis that we can look at. The first is organizational. When the crisis is the result of just an organizational failure, either a failure to plan or failure to organize properly, failure to a failure of leadership or management or structural failure of some sort and organization. We look at contemporary example would be when we had Elon Musk take over Twitter. We've seen a number of organizational issues stem from that, right? Stem from just the way that it was handled and the way that people are quitting in masks, people are getting fired, they're doing things and then taking them back quickly. These are organizational decisions, things that could have been handled differently and it's really a matter of these are issues stemming from a lack of organizational clarity, a lack of organizational control, a lack of organizational planning. So these are crises that are precipitated by the organization that are really impacted by the organization. So they're organizational crisis. This is an organizational crisis for them and Twitter. You also have sometimes you have a product crisis, a crisis that is directly related to the product or service that you provide. So in the case of the Samsung Note 7, if you recall the lithium ion battery they had was exploding, was melting basically, was overheating and melting and you were getting phones like this with this kind of damage. People were getting injured and that's a product failure. That's a product crisis that Samsung had to deal with specifically related to a product that they had produced and put out and had to try and correct then that issue, but that was a specific product issue. You can also have a type of crisis where litigation is the primary issue. Years ago, this was quite a while ago, so I'm reaching back a little bit here, but McDonald's actually had an issue with their coffee, right? Their coffee was hot. Somebody apparently had coffee spilled on them and then sued McDonald's because the coffee was so hot and they didn't feel like they were worn properly and so forth. So they saw some litigation that resulted from that and that was a type of crisis for them. It was certainly a PR crisis for them. It was all over the news. It was a big deal. People were making fun of it all the time. It just became this big mess for McDonald's that they weren't really looking for. I didn't really want this for their organization, but so they had this crisis that stemmed from litigation. It could be being sued over anything that could be that type of crisis. So you need a plan for those types of things as well. So there are different types of crisis, organizational product and litigation crisis that you can run into. The crisis life cycle, without getting into great detail here, it basically has these three stages. You have the pre-crisis stage. You have the crisis impact stage and the crisis recovery stage in this life cycle. So then the pre-crisis, we see here the warning signs potentially if there are any of this crisis that something may be happening. Again, a really observant management and a really observant PR staff will identify these early on hopefully even before things happen, but you'll see these warning signs and maybe take some initial preemptory actions to divert or at least to minimize the crisis as much as possible. So this all happens before it reaches that critical impact point. So in the pre-crisis there are some things we can do there. So that's that first stage though. But once the actual crisis happens, the actual crisis is underway, then we're in what we call crisis impact. So we're in the midst of this crisis, actual crisis is underway. Our focus then is minimizing the negative impact on those affected, first of all, on those who may be negatively affected by the product. For Samsung, when their phone was blown up, it was, okay, what can we do to keep people safe? What can we do for people who bought the Note 7? How can we help keep them safe, keep them from being injured? And then also what can we do to minimize the negative impact on our reputation, on our product, things like that. One of the famously one of the famous PR crises that an organization had was Johnson & Johnson. Back in the early 80s when they had the Tylenol pills that were laced with cyanide and several people died from that. And immediately they took all action to recall these products, to put safety measures in place, to keep it from happening again and all these types of things. They couldn't control what had happened necessarily at that point. I mean, what had happened had happened. All they could do was first of all, try and protect their customers as much as possible. And then secondly, protect their reputation by making amends and doing things differently, moving forward, trying to correct things. So that's during the crisis impact stage. What actions are we going to take right now to help minimize the impact, the negative impact of this in a physical sense on the public, and also in a sense on our organization as well? I'm trying to protect our organization as much as possible during that time. After that initial wave has passed and we've kind of gotten things under control, our focus is then on recovery, crisis recovery, which involves returning to normal as quickly as possible. We want to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and try and push that under the rug as much as possible, not to hide things, but to move past whatever the crisis was as quickly as possible while also making the adjustments that are needed to prevent the same thing from happening again. So not only did Johnson and Johnson in that moment apologize, recall all their products, do everything they could to keep people safe, but then they took steps. He started seeing the safety seals added to these pill bottles and different things that were intended to help people identify when a pill has been tampered with. And to prevent that from happening again, that's part of crisis recovery. You're trying to restore not only the safety of their product, but the restoration of the image and reputation of the organization. Johnson and Johnson got a lot of credit for accepting full responsibility for these things and making the corrections that were necessary as opposed to trying to hide things and point the fingers at other people and things they just said, okay, this is us. This is our product. We're going to make this right as much as possible. So then you enter in that crisis recovery phase of trying to get things back to normal and try and restore the image and reputation of your organization as well. So we see crises move through these different life cycles. They have the pre-crisis, the crisis impact where you're in the midst of it, and then the crisis recovery that comes after. The last thing I want to touch on here, and we're just kind of glossing over some of these things to give you an idea of what crisis communication is like. This is intended just to be a quick overview of this important aspect of public relations work is the impact of social media cannot underscore or overstate the impact of social media on crisis communication in the modern era. First of all, social media is pervasive. It's everywhere. We have it all over the place. We have it on our phones. We have it on our computers. We have all kinds of different channels. We have Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all these different things, Twitter, of course. And so it's pervasive. It's everywhere. So as an organization, we need to understand that it's everywhere. We need to first acknowledge that it's everywhere and that it has an impact and that we need to use that to the best of our advantage whenever possible. Well, I need to understand that social media can be helpful in identifying issues. When we start to see patterns, we start to see regular complaints about this specific thing, we can say, okay, through social media, we can use that data. We can say, okay, obviously, there's something happening here where there's smoke, there's fire, and so we can use that to track down issues, to nip them in the bud, to keep crisis from expanding any further. We can pay attention. We can use social media as a way to identify potential issues or potential crises either before they happen or as they're beginning before they really get a chance to ramp up too much further. We can also understand that social media can be useful in establishing a firm foundation and that firm foundation can enhance trust in our brand, in our organization. When we've used social media responsibly and we've taken advantage of it and used it well, used it to the benefit of the public and used it to develop some trust within that community, then that can be especially helpful in the midst of a crisis. When we're communicating with those people, we're going to have a higher level of ethos and credibility with that community and be able to have our communication be trusted to those things so we can use social media. Then if we've in advance established that as a firm foundation, established a trusting and credible relationship with the community and with our audience, then we can use social media to our advantage in that way. What else we need to recognize as social media is a double-edged sword, of course, right? It's a double-edged sword. You're going to get the good and the bad. You're going to get the opportunity to reach your community. You're also going to get the opportunity to hear from people in your community. When you're in the midst of a crisis, you're going to get some hateful things thrown at you. There's very little you can do about that. At this stage, there's no real control over social media to a certain extent. We just have to recognize that social media is what it is. It's a double-edged sword. We can use it as our advantage and use it as a positive, but there's also going to be negative aspects of it. We're just going to have to accept and deal with that as well. Overall, when we're dealing with crises as a PR person and an organization or a company, we want to first be ready. We want to respond. We want to then recover and restore as best as possible. That's the flow of things in crisis communication. You can't always control everything. You won't always know about it in advance. Crises are going to happen, and they're going to come up. The best you can do is be as prepared as possible by being ready. Then you can respond when something does happen. Don't shy away. Really lean into it and do what's best for not only your organization, but for your community. Be honest and straightforward and respond in that way. Then we do the best we can to recover, both by keeping our community and our public and our customers safe. Also, then recovering and restoring what we can in terms of image and reputation for organization. Ideally, come out stronger on the other end of things if we've handled things as effectively as we can. Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of what we mean when we say crisis communication and especially how that's different from issue management, which are very different things, but it gives you an overview of crisis communication and better understanding of what that world looks like. I hope that this has been helpful for you and that you'll be prepared to deal with things as crises come up in whatever organization you're at as the public relations practitioner.