View all guides The Essential Guide to Crisis Communications

Is your team prepared to weather a crisis?

Crisis can strike at any time, catching even the most experienced PR teams by surprise. Your best line of defense is having a plan in place before a crisis strikes to protect your organization. In high-stakes situations, preparedness isn’t just ideal—it’s essential.

Building and protecting brand reputation for stronger crisis communications

Proactive brand reputation management is a must for all organizations. Building brand credibility and goodwill with your audience can help you avoid crises and potentially soften the blow if one does occur.

This section will cover best practices for proactively building brand reputation using Media Monitoring, Social Listening and Media Intelligence.

The risks of getting caught off-guard

No one wants to be defined by a crisis. But if you’re caught off-guard, your team could be left cleaning up a mess of misinformation and internal chaos at your organization. For example, failing to monitor your brand mentions could mean that you miss the early warning signs of a problem—like a rogue tweet from an influencer—until it’s too late.

Proactively managing brand reputation helps you mitigate issues before they get out of control—and could help you avoid crises altogether.

Real-time media monitoring: Tracking brand perception

One of the most important ongoing tasks for PR teams is media monitoring. Real-time media monitoring lets you know when your brand, products, spokespeople or competitors are mentioned in the media so you can jump on opportunities and manage crises.

Why it matters: Consistent media monitoring helps you protect your brand reputation by catching potential issues early. You can use these insights to help inform your overall PR strategy.

What you need to know: Media monitoring

Getting started: Sophisticated media monitoring software is essential for automating data collection and gives you far more insights than Google Alerts. Look for a platform equipped with AI and machine learning to give you real-time alerts and one that goes beyond surface-level insights.

Monitoring across media types: It’s critical to have a full view of your brand’s mentions across media. Online news monitoring includes all the content on the web where your brand can be mentioned, including news websites, blogs and social media. Print news monitoring includes traditional print media like newspapers and magazines, but depending on your niche, you may need to monitor academic journals and other niche publications.

Monitoring sentiment: It’s not just about what is being said, but who is saying it. Sentiment tells you how people are talking about your brand, products and/or spokespeople. It helps measure the impact of your PR efforts and detect shifts in the way your brand is being talked about over time. Tracking sentiment helps you detect the early signs of a crisis so you can act swiftly.

Social listening: Keeping a pulse on brand conversations

Monitoring online, broadcast, podcasts and social media is an important part of protecting your brand reputation. Social listening takes it a step further by helping you proactively find and interpret conversations on your brand, audience, industry, product category and more. It complements media monitoring by giving you a comprehensive picture of your brand.

Why it matters: Since social media and news coverage are deeply connected, PR teams need media monitoring and social listening to fully understand the broader conversation happening about your brand.

What you need to know: Social listening

Getting started: For PR teams, your average social media management tools built for marketers or other parts of a business won’t cut it—you need a dedicated PR platform with social listening tools built specifically for PR practitioners to properly establish and protect your brand’s reputation. Look for software that includes features like cross-channel media monitoring, integrated journalist and influencer database, advanced social listening and advanced analytics.

Spot themes, advocates and detractors: Effective social listening isn’t about reading every tweet, it’s about finding meaningful patterns. It helps you find brand advocates, or people who defend or praise your brand. It also helps you identify detractors, or people who criticize your brand. You can spot common themes—like frequent discussions on a specific product issue—and use those insights to adjust your messaging and inform other teams. These insights are not only invaluable to the PR team, they can seriously impact your brand’s bottom line.

Find sentiment shifts early: Social listening gives you the power to detect the earliest signs of a potential crisis. For example, if you spot several customers complaining about a bad experience with your brand, you have an opportunity to respond or take action before it becomes a viral hashtag or headline. If a crisis does strike, social listening lets you measure public reaction to your response so you can adjust your messaging accordingly.

Gain a competitive advantage: Get clued into how your competitors are being talked about and use that intel to adjust your strategy. You can even identify all the influencers and creators your competitors are engaging with.

Media intelligence for proactive crisis management

Media monitoring and social listening give you important data. Media intelligence takes all that data and turns it into strategic insights. For enterprise brands with more complex needs (and countless daily media mentions), this extra layer of strategic support is necessary to stay ahead—especially when it comes to crisis communications.

Why it matters: Media intelligence allows brands to manage crises proactively, helping you spot potential issues or patterns quickly before they become a bigger problem. It gives PR teams a chance to get ahead of a crisis and update messaging if needed or craft a thoughtful response on behalf of their brand.

What you need to know: Media intelligence

Getting started: Look for PR software with a media intelligence program that blends AI with human analysis. You’ll want a solution that streamlines your PR team’s workflow by lessening the load of manual tasks associated with reporting. Custom reports are key—you should be able to have them tailored to your specific stakeholders, such as the C-suite and legal teams.

See the full picture when crisis strikes: To manage a crisis effectively, you have to bring together insights from all corners—traditional media, social media, and more. Media analysis helps you find the most important stories, the people who matter most and the sentiment around your brand. Once you have all the information, you can create a well-informed plan of action.

Evaluate the aftermath of a crisis: When the dust settles, media intelligence shows you how a crisis impacted your brand. You can see how a story spread, who spread it and if your crisis response was effective. You have an opportunity to report back to stakeholders on the metrics that matter most to them. With all of these insights, you can use this data to fine-tune your crisis response in the future.

Why a crisis plan of action is essential for every PR team

Even with a solid brand reputation and vigilant monitoring, crises can still happen. The difference between a crisis that causes lasting damage and one that is swiftly managed often comes down to preparation. In this section, we’ll cover why having a crisis plan is so important, along with tactical tips for crisis communication.

When a crisis erupts, every minute counts. A crisis communication plan gives you a roadmap that guides your organization on what to do and say (and who should do it) in those critical first hours and beyond.

Without a plan, response efforts can be chaotic—allowing a small bump to spiral into a full-blown crisis. Having a plan ensures accuracy and consistency: it contains pre-vetted messaging templates, a clear chain of command for approvals and defined roles, so you’re not making everything up on the fly.

Building a crisis communications plan with insights from media monitoring and social listening

Your crisis communications plan will be stronger if it’s informed by real insights from your media monitoring and social listening efforts. While every crisis communication plan should be built to be flexible and adjust to the crisis at hand, here are some pointers for getting started creating your own crisis communications plan:

• Use past insights: Start by reviewing the data you have gathered over time about your brand’s vulnerabilities. What types of negative stories or complaints tend to pop up in your media monitoring reports? What issues do customers frequently raise on social media? These patterns can indicate likely crisis scenarios.
• Align teams and stakeholders: Be sure to involve key stakeholders—not just the PR team. Consider leadership, legal, HR, operations, IT and any other relevant departments. Gaining cross-functional input ensures the plan is realistic and covers all bases (for instance, IT needs to handle a cyber incident, HR handles a personnel crisis, etc.).
• Define a crisis response team: Typically, it includes a core team including the PR lead, social media manager, legal counsel, among others, depending on the nature of the crisis. You must define roles and responsibilities: who drafts statements, who approves them, who speaks to the media, who monitors channels and who coordinates logistics. Make sure that all team members have an up-to-date contact list and backups. Share the crisis plan with all these stakeholders and ensure everyone understands it.
• Practice crisis simulations: Once your plan is drafted and your team is aligned, simulate crisis scenarios to test the plan. This can be as simple as a tabletop exercise (walking through a hypothetical crisis in a meeting) or as involved as a full-blown crisis drill with role-playing.

Learn more about preparing for a crisis: download your free crisis comms checklist.

Crisis response best practices: accuracy, speed and transparency

Despite your best efforts to prevent them, crises do occur. Now the moment of truth arrives: how you respond. In this section, we’ll break down the key elements of crisis response.

• Balancing accuracy and speed: In a crisis, it’s important to balance a timely response with accurate information. This can be challenging when timing is critical and your audience is waiting for a statement. However, issuing a statement before you gather all the facts can make matters worse. Don’t sacrifice accuracy or issue a hasty message just to get a response out the door. Only when you’ve thoroughly assessed the situation with your team can you then activate your crisis plan. When you get this balance right, you’ll manage the narrative and maintain trust, even as the crisis unfolds.
• Acting with transparency: Being transparent means you openly acknowledge the situation, communicate what you know and keep lines of communication open. Transparency also means explaining your actions. If you’re taking steps to fix the problem, let people know what those are. For example, if your website is down and it’s impacting a significant number of customers, you can let them know that you’re aware of the issue, it’s being worked on and when they can expect another update.
• Clear and empathetic messaging: In a crisis, how you communicate can be as important as what you communicate. Use plain language, be concise and focus on the key points your audience needs to know. Empathy means acknowledging the human side of the crisis: the fears, concerns and emotions of those affected. Remember to tailor the tone to the situation. Tools like PressPal.ai can be useful in helping refine statements for different audiences.
• Using media monitoring and social listening as the situation unfolds: Once your response is in motion, you need to actively monitor the situation in real-time as it unfolds. This means continuing (and even ramping up) the media monitoring and social listening we discussed earlier, but now with a focus on the crisis at hand and the reaction to your response. This part is critical in helping you evaluate how well your message is getting across and whether it’s achieving the desired effect. Are media outlets accurately reporting your statements, or are there misquotes that need correcting? Is social media calming down after your apology, or are people getting more upset? You might discover through monitoring that despite your efforts, a certain misconception is trending and you may need to address it ASAP with additional communication. Or you might see positive signals, like key influencers voicing support, which indicates your strategy is working.

Learn more about responding to a crisis: download your free crisis response checklist here.