Page 200 - Crisis Communication Practical PR Strategies

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Organizational Barriers 181
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become a crisis. These potential early stage warnings are, in fact,
exactly the time when change and action can mitigate a crisis.
Often, responding to the concern early on can avert a crisis. If a
consumer privacy group is targeting financial services companies for
their handling of consumer data, then taking early action by creating a
consumer Bill of Rights, or deploying advanced security technology,
might stem the impact of this issue. This kind of response requires
valuable corporate resources and capital, yet it’s a minor investment
compared with having to respond to government regulatory interven-
tion or a consumer boycott and the impact on a company’s stock price.
Early monitoring and response to a potential crisis can also give an
organization enough time to calculate, respond and maybe even co-opt
an issue before it turns into a crisis. If a healthcare provider is seeing the
winds of change regarding, say, access to hospital care statistics, it might
decide to ‘own’ the issue, putting in place policies and public access
systems that get it ahead of the curve. This kind of forward thinking can
give the healthcare provider a competitive position in its market.
The days of annual corporate responsibility reviews or issues
mapping, monthly legislative monitoring and weekly clips reports are
over. Today’s public relations people need to monitor, in real-time, the
new channels of their stakeholders from blogs and 24/7 international
news, new media and citizen journalism.
The irony of early monitoring is that in collecting so much informa-
tion it may be difficult to identify these early, pre-crisis issues. Most
large companies face hundreds of these issues – from public advocacy,
through legislative affairs, to workplace rights. Which one should the
PR professional focus on? How do you track all these changes going on
among your stakeholders? How can you alert management to these
potential concerns? The challenge is setting up a process to identify,
review and re-evaluate these issues and to constantly keep manage-
ment aware of the business and policy implications of these potential
threats (or opportunities).

Corporate resources can’t trump a crisis

‘Put the lawyers and PR guys on this.’

Business people are action-oriented. They see a challenge, set a
strategy, assign resources to a problem, and look for ‘checklist’ effi-
ciency in executing the tactics. Once an action or campaign is set in
motion, they move on to the next challenge, assuming this week’s
problem is being managed.