Crisis communications: what (not) to do when disaster strikes

For the past month Australian and global media headlines have been dominated by huge businesses, servicing millions of people (think Optus, OpenAI, to name a few), being called out for failing to manage their communications strategy well and recognise that the community at large want and deserve real, honest and transparent answers, writes Samantha Dybac, CEO and founder of The PR Hub, and host of the Influence Unlocked podcast

However public relations (PR) crises are not the sole domain of listed companies, major media outlets and celebrities or people in the spotlight. No business is immune to a crisis; they might just look a little different. Especially for small businesses, it can be easy to get caught up in the never-ending to-do list, but anticipating and preparing for a crisis should never be left until it’s too late.

Each business is different and you obviously need to plan accordingly. Ultimately, the end goal is to make sure your brand and reputation – your business’ and your own as founder, owner, or executive – is protected to ensure you don’t lose the support of your investors, staff, or customers.

What (not) to do.

How you manage and communicate during a crisis will reveal the true character of your organisation.

There’s a lot to learn from Optus’ November ‘23 outage cum PR crisis extravaganza – when more than 10 million Australian personal and business customers lost phone and internet services for the best part of a day – and its CEO’s sensational resignation shortly thereafter.

It’s almost incomprehensible to think that Optus, Australia’s second biggest telco, wouldn’t have been better prepared or improved their crisis communications strategy having only dealt with another colossal PR disaster in the form of a nationwide cyber breach just 13 months prior.

Same goes for Open AI, parent company of ChatGPT, whose CEO Sam Altman was ousted then brought back in again after almost their entire workforce, several of which publicly shamed the company’s management of the crisis, threatened to walk, all in the space of a few days last week. ‘Chaos’ and ‘farce’ are not words I’d ever want associated with my business, would you?Make crisis communications planning a priorityIf you’re a small business or SME, you’re likely not to have the resources to put a dedicated crisis communications team in place, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t develop a strategy and implementation plan.

And if you’re thinking ’We’re OK, we’re not Optus or ChatGPT, we’d never face a challenge like in our business,’ think again, because PR crises can take many forms. Here are just a few volatile scenarios The PR Hub clients have managed over the years:

• You want to increase the price of your memberships, or introduce a subscription model for the first time, and are not sure how loyal customers will respond
• You might be looking to stop providing a product or service, or phase out a subscription
• Perhaps you tapped out an ill-considered Tweet (here’s looking at you Elon Musk) that was quickly shared and screenshotted before you had time to rethink, or
• Maybe your e-commerce platform was swamped during the recent Black Friday sales and your site went down

In the era of social media, customer responses and reviews are a fact of life and can be extraordinarily influential, and brands can no longer hide behind inauthentic responses to them. Customers expect and deserve more and bad PR can make or break a small business. So having a plan in place can help stop online ‘fires’ spreading in a timely and considered way.

How can you prepare a crisis response? What do you need to do? Where to start?

Sit down with your executive team, advisors, and investors and be honest with yourselves and each other about what could go wrong (and why).

What can you anticipate? To what extent are you able to model a scenario around a risk so that you can develop a plan as to how your business could react and respond to it? Don’t think of this process as an admission of cracks in your operations. Instead, use the opportunity to go beyond your role as a business founder or CEO and step into the shoes of your customers or stakeholders.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Consider their wants and needs. How are they likely to respond to decisions you make or situations that unfold? Treat your audience with respect and ‘do unto others’. Optus was harshly criticised for a lack of sensitivity and of being ‘out of touch’ with the broader Australian public during its most recent crisis.

External help can be useful. Don’t go it alone, especially if you’re a founder who might not view things through an objective lens. At a minimum it’s advisable that your executive team are fully across crisis communications plans and messaging, though it’s preferable that non-executive staff also feel a level of involvement, too.

Timing and delivery of your messaging is vital. During a crisis you can’t expect to entirely control the message, but you need to be seen to be doing everything you possibly can to manage it. Once your messaging is in the public domain, stay focused on that. Don’t backflip or blame, or be seen to be responding to the media rather than the situation itself.

Optus’ CEO wrongly publicly blamed parent company Singtel for its recent outage – a very bad look in anyone’s book. Likewise, who could forget the shocking Dreamworld tragedy on the Gold Coast in 2016, which resulted in the deaths of four guests and a PR nightmare for both the theme park and its parent company over their handling of the tragedy.

When the unexpected happens, the ‘who, what, how, and when’ you communicate should focus on one thing – your customer, your determination to get to the bottom of what happened and, ultimately, the measures that you will take to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Stay true to your values and hold yourself accountable as a leader; and history (and the internet) will remember you for all the right reasons.

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