While on a typical day, public relations works in favor of your company, there may come a time where you need to do damage control.
Let’s say you’re Britney Spears’ agent. Or the owner of a jet-flying major car manufacturer. Or the producer of pork during swine flu season. You’re going to need a little help untarnishing your reputation. Especially in this digital age of Twitter and blogs, when bad news spreads faster than, well, swine flu.
How do you stop the bleeding and salvage some scrap of dignity for your business?
- Address the problem head-on. You can’t hide from it. Tropicana did nothing more than a package redesign and was brutally slayed by the media. The best thing to do is admit there is a problem (reeks a bit of AA, doesn’t it?)
- Develop open communication. If you’re stock’s in the toilet, shareholders want to know how you’ll fix it. If your company is filing bankruptcy, your customers may panic. Create open lines of communication to tell people how you plan to address the situation. (Take Obama. He walked into a hot mess with our economy and he’s done a great job of telling us what his next steps are.)
- Don’t red herring. It may be tempting to donate massive amounts of money to a charity to get people to look the other way, but it won’t work. Just stick to the issue and do your best to resolve it.
- Follow through. Do what you say you’ll do. Otherwise you’ll suffer more scrutiny, and the situation will last longer than it has to.
- Move on. Once you’re past the crisis, learn from your mistakes and move forward.
Have you had a crisis you had to control? What did you do to fix it?
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Susan Payton is the Marketing Eggspert, and owner of 
Learning from a mistake is a must if you want to earn online.