Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Newbies PR, this video is on crisis management, and that is making plans to prevent or prepare for a crisis before it happens, handling it when it does, and recovering from it afterwards. As Business News Daily explains, these can range from a string of bad reviews, or to an executive corporate scandal, and your audience will judge how you respond. So what are these different types of scenarios or crises? HubSpot breaks them down into 8 categories. There are Financial, Personnel, Organizational, Technological, Natural, Confrontations, Workplace Violence, Crisis of Malevolence, and anything else that could be particular to your industry or business that you can think of. Visit this HubSpot article for more information on each of these types. Going back to Business News Daily, they give some more specific examples, such as it could be related to an unhealthy business practice, a customer accident at your location, or an internal employee related issue. As mentioned in the beginning, you can think of crisis management in 3 parts, the before, the during, and the after. So firstly, let's look at the before. Before anything has happened, you need to make preemptive plans for what to do in each of these scenarios. You want everyone on your team to be on board with these plans, because when something does happen, you need to act quickly, rather than taking the time to deliberate on what to do. Have steps in place to make sure everyone involved in your crisis response plan can be alerted as fast as possible. Have a list of what you want to look for when assessing the situation, with questions such as who is involved, what will the impact likely be, and do we understand the full situation. Then have action plans for what each person on your team needs to do. There are resources such as HubSpot that have sample crisis management kits that will help you in this process. The second part of the before is being a good organization. That's a very general statement. So what do I mean? This involves putting in the effort to show that you care about your customers, team members, etc. So avoid anything that could cause profit losses, employees to quit, to lose customers, technology failures, supply chain issues, and so on. Some things that you can make sure that you are doing are creating high quality, valuable products and services, products that are helpful in some way, that don't break easy, come up with a new product or updates to your software or services often, and have good internal relations with your employees, treat them with respect, adjust your pay for inflation, have good internal communication where their ideas and concerns can be heard, that they are trained well, and have systems in place to prevent supply chain issues like a factory or shipping disaster, or a lack of products, etc. Show social corporate responsibility and do things for local communities and the environment and so on that show your values and make you look good in the eyes of the public and the media. So take note of every aspect of your business from your product, your production, your employees, the public, and anything or anyone else that has a stake in your company. Make sure you as a business are giving your full effort to ensure the highest quality and care in each of these areas. This will greatly lower your chances of something bad happening for your brand, and if something does happen, when you tell your audience that you are working to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again, they will believe you. This is now the stage when something inevitably happens. What are the steps in handling it? Well, thanks to the plans you've made for each scenario, everyone on your crisis response team will know what to do. In general, there are main rules to stick to that stay pretty consistent, which include appoint a response team, as we already talked about, craft your message, so think about the most transparent way to address the situation and what your company has done and will do about it without placing external blame. Apologize right away, take responsibility for the occurrence, and make it clear that it won't happen again. Identify and address the affected parties. You should identify the people who need to know about the situation such as employees, stakeholders, business partners, customers, and the media. Make sure to let them know right away, and don't lie about the problem, the cause, or say that it's not that bad if it will be. Again, be honest and transparent. Monitor the situation, so track things such as what people are saying about your company online and on social media, your sales numbers, comments from employees, concerns from shareholders, and be prepared to answer questions. There are systems such as Google Alerts that let you know when your brand is being mentioned. This can help you discover a problem unfolding, because information spreads very fast on the internet today. Flash out, so keep emotions aside and respond thoughtfully. Even if someone has said something false, there is a way to go about it. Such as the Pepsi can tampering crisis. Someone falsely claimed that Pepsi was putting syringes in some of their cans in production. Pepsi knew this wasn't true, so they got surveillance camera footage of people putting syringes into Pepsi cans in stores, and they showed videos demonstrating their can packaging process. And Pepsi also made even more efforts to reassure that their customers were safe by implementing additional quality control measures and introducing tamper resistant packaging. Answering questions with no comment. So answering no comment is better than giving a wrong answer or false answer, but this makes it look like you don't care, or that you are hiding something. So be honest and explain all that you know, and say that you will come back with more details as soon as they become available to you. Responding too quickly. As we learned, we need to be quick as possible in our response, but responding before you know all the facts is not the way to go about it. So having to go back and explain a mistake you made in a statement is going to make your company look even worse. After the crisis, and how to recover from a crisis. So saying sorry and calling it a day is not enough. As I said, make sure that you are monitoring mentions of your company online, and respond to any questions others have. Let them know your action plan to prevent such an issue going forward. Make sure to keep transparent in your business practices and goals to your customers and employees. And then once it's dying down, to get yourself back into a positive light, you can start planning a campaign to get positive attention again. To get a real world picture, I will give some examples of crises that were handled well. Firstly, as I mentioned before, there was the Pepsi can tampering incident that they handled pretty well. Another one was with Domino's Pizza. In 2009, two employees of Domino's posted a video. It showed themselves, let's just say, engaging in unsanitary practices while making food. The video went viral, and sparked outrage. This could have damaged the Domino's brand. Domino's took a little too long to respond publicly, which wasn't good. But when they did, they announced that the employees from the video were fired, Domino's CEO released a public apology on YouTube, and they spread awareness of the new policies they were implementing to ensure that the food was safe, and about the new employee training program. Another example was the Toyota Recall. In 2010, it was discovered that some of its vehicles had a defect that can cause unattended acceleration. The company immediately stopped sales of the affected models. Toyota then also took steps to improve its safety processes and communication with customers. The last one for this video, Airbnb's response to COVID-19. So in 2020, as you know, COVID-19 happened. The travel restrictions and lockdowns disrupted the hospitality industry, providing a challenge to Airbnb. So Airbnb wanted to make sure that their audience knew that they were taking measures to protect their guests, such as new cleaning protocols, and they also provided refunds for cancellations due to COVID. They also launched an initiative to help people in need have housing. That's it for this video. For more knowledge on public relations, subscribe to Newbies PR, the beginning of your PR learning journey.