Crisis PR

Reader question:

What’s “crisis PR”?

My comments:

First of all, PR stands for Public Relations, involving schemes and measures, say, a company takes to promote its image in the eye of the public.

Crisis PR refers to what you do when you’re faced with a crisis in PR, i.e. what you do to minimize the damage the said crisis might pose to hurt your public image.

That’s crisis management, a more familiar term for dealing with crises in general.

Crises, such as?

Such as a faulty product. A car company, for example, may be forced to call back all of its vehicles after finding out that one of their back doors sometimes opens on its own for no apparent reason.

Crisis management is, hence, what you do to manage and limit the damage.

Crisis PR, on the other hand, refers to the PR aspects of this management. A professional Public Relations company may be hired, for instance, to help a company to deal with a PR crisis, so as to salvage or at least limit the damage to its brand.

In a nutshell, that’s it.

Just remember, crisis PR is what you do after something goes terribly wrong, and you can get a good idea of how it works via the following media examples:

1. US FIRMS are facing the scary new possibility of being singled out in a Twitter tirade by the tweet-happy new President – a Crisis PR headache.

Aside from being a fascinating, albeit horrifying, phenomenon to observe across the Atlantic, there really are useful lessons for businesses of all types and sizes here in the UK.

Already Reuters is reporting that: “Companies are also beefing up their Twitter monitoring for any Trump tweets that could affect them and engaging public relations firms for advice on potential lines of attack and how to respond if they were to come.”

As the old adage has it, when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. So, we might reasonably expect to see Trumpesque attacks on businesses start to emerge among politicians on this side of the pond.

While the Reuters report is fascinating, it’s worth pointing out that working with PR professionals isn’t just for a crisis. Public relations can help keep your business in the best of health at all times – while being prepared for the worst is a very useful spin-off benefit.

You may not check the Trump’s frantic newsfeed, or news stories bearing his name may cause you to switch off. So we’ve pulled together an update on a few businesses that have been caught in The Donald’s 140 character crosshairs.

This useful summary explains how they reacted to this completely new phenomenon – business reputational crises caused by the itchy Twitter finger of the man now occupying the White House.

- Crisis PR Lessons From Businesses Trashed by Trump Online, HolyroodPR.co.uk, January 17, 2017.

2. “I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement that addressed a series of news stories reporting Facebook’s data had been misused. In the 937-word statement, posted on his Facebook profile Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg outlined all that Facebook has done and plans to do to keep our data safe.

But while he has addressed the news issue he hasn’t addressed the underlying problem. By the time Mark Zuckerberg made his amends it was already too late.

What has happened in the last five days has been the biggest crisis of Facebook’s existence. But Zuckerberg’s five-day silent treatment may prove more damning for Facebook than any of the news that precipitated it. This wouldn’t be nearly as extreme crisis for most companies. When bad things happen at other Fortune 500 companies, there is a script they follow – call it good crisis PR. The head of communications promises to look into an issue. A CEO makes a statement, well-reviewed by the legal team beforehand. If the crisis is really bad, someone resigns or gets fired. Once the perceived villain has been held accountable, everyone returns to normal unscathed. These corporate theatrics have come to embody the acceptable approach to business accountability.

But Facebook has always been a different kind of company – billing itself as a more intimate, personal service than, say, a car manufacturer (like Volkswagen) or an oil distributor (like BP). After all, what Facebook is selling is intimacy: a place to house your thoughts and opinions, and connect to friends and family. You can trust Facebook – you have to! You friends are here! And your number one friend, Mark Zuckerberg, is always at the ready to tell you what Facebook is doing and why.

Until the past year, this approach to building Facebook has been Zuckerberg’s chief asset. He intuited earlier than most that a decade after the internet’s introduction, people had begun to trust individuals over companies, and the best way to build a 21st century business was to build it in the guise of a person. As he told Bloomberg BusinessWeek last fall, “People trust people, not institutions.”

…

But over this past year, this approach has frayed. Increasingly, it has become obvious there are things our friend Zuckerberg isn’t telling us. In February, this magazine put a battered image of Zuckerberg on the cover, detailing the company’s desperate efforts to address news and information. Now comes the revelation that for several years, Facebook allowed third parties to access vast amounts of our personal information, and the company was both lax in monitoring how those groups used that data, and slow to address abuse when it was discovered. These facts reveal Facebook’s struggles over how to address the challenges that the openness it has always prized has wrought. They raise questions about the degree to which Facebook has acted and is acting in the best interest of its users, and suggest the possibility that Facebook has, at times, covered up information. And they force us all to ask: Can Mark Zuckerberg be trusted?

- The Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s Silence, Wired.com, March 21, 2018.

3. What started as the story of a bombshell legal complaint filed by a famous actor against her director and costar has since turned into a tale of two PR campaigns and a reckoning in the broader public relations industry.

After Blake Lively filed the complaint on December 20 accusing Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment on the set of their film “It Ends with Us” and a retaliatory smear campaign in the press, publicists were abuzz picking apart how both camps responded to the news.

Lively’s filing includes reams of messages that paint a picture in which Baldoni, his publicist Jennifer Abel, and Melissa Nathan, a crisis management expert, detail plans to direct the conversation away from Lively’s sexual-harassment allegations by enlisting journalists and an online fixer to create, publish, and amplify negative stories about her.

The messages in the complaint – and its allegations of astroturfing, a controversial practice in public relations that exists in a legal gray area – offer a peek behind the curtain of crisis PR, one that industry figures who spoke with BI say is giving their profession a bad name.

“Who is the real victim behind the smear campaign?” Molly McPherson, a crisis communications manager, said in an Instagram post breaking down her thoughts on Lively and Baldoni’s ordeal. “It’s PR. It’s public relations.”

Hollywood is full of public relations firms big and small. Most work with studios, distributors, or directly with talent in the day-to-day grind of promoting their work and building relationships with the media and influencers.

Crisis management is an entirely different animal. They’re the people called in when a controversy or scandal hits a client that’s too complicated or messy for a publicist to handle on their own.

“A crisis management person is hired to make sure all the assets are protected,” a veteran crisis management publicist told BI. Unlike regular publicists, who ‘don’t want to get their hands dirty,’ crisis PR firms are trained for this very purpose. “I know how to bob and weave, jump in and jump out,” the source added.

The proposed campaign to damage Lively’s reputation, as outlined in her complaint via quotes from Nathan’s messages to Abel and Baldoni, included “social manipulation” on platforms like Reddit and “full social account take downs.” In the messages, Nathan suggested having a full social-media crisis team on hand to “start threads of theories” about Lively and Baldoni’s rumored feud and to create “social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change [sic] narrative and stay on track.”

“All of this will be most importantly untraceable,” Lively’s suit quotes Nathan as saying.

Lively’s complaint argues that the tactics in Abel and Nathan’s campaign on behalf of Baldoni went “well beyond standard crisis PR” by deploying the controversial practice of astroturfing, a tactic used in PR and politics to falsely create the illusion of public consensus or a “grassroots movement.”

“Millions of people (including many reporters and influencers) who saw these planted stories, social media posts, and other online content had no idea they were unwitting consumers of a crisis PR, astroturfing, and digital retaliation campaign,” Lively's suit says, adding that the campaign blurred “the line between authentic and manufactured content, and creating viral public takedowns.”

- PR pros call fallout of Lively-Baldoni saga a ‘black eye’ for the industry, BusinessInsider.com, December 27, 2024.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）