Preparation, ownership mindset, speed are critical for managing online crises: Experts

How prepared is the communications industry to manage the online crises? Researchers have compared the nature of social media crises to zombies, where if you shoot one down, another comes to take its place. In today’s age of viral social media content and 24-hour news cycles, one wrong move can land a company in the throes of a PR crisis and tank its reputation. Thus, it becomes key for company leaders to limit the damage.

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At Adgully’s IMAGEXX 2021 Summit, an expert panel shared their views on managing online crises. The discussion was joined by:

Charu Raizada, Communications Consultant (Moderator)

Amith Prabhu, Co-founder, PRAXIS - The PRomise Foundation and Founding Dean, School of Communications & Reputation (SCoRe)

Paresh Chaudhry, Group President – Corporate Brand Custodian, Adani Group

Nikhil Dey, Executive Director, Adfactors PR

Shalini Singh, Head of Corporate Communications and Sustainability, LafargeHolcim

Meghana Dave, Head – Marketing & PR, Automobili Lamborghini India

How can we take control of the narrative before it does real damage?

Paresh Chaudhry: Narrative is not about saying ‘we’ll create a publishing paper or white paper about some issues’, but something that seeps in from the chairman of the organisation right down to the employee who’s doing some mining, managing a power plant or working at the front end of a store. Narrative is having a list of key messaging post the mapping of ‘what are the gaps in understanding of a corporate’. What are the perception gaps? Where are we getting hit internally and externally? That narrative that we have needs to be drilled down to first year employees, vendors and partners and then we go and talk to the next employee. A playbook that lists down all the why’s and the don’ts and make sure that you have genuine, honest, factual answers to those real perceptions so that it remains forever with the employees, the media, influencers and the government. If you can do that consistently, you have a good chance of surviving.

Shalini Singh: What is also important is to leverage your networks like the employees. How do you create positive influencers for your company? Who are they? People who come to mind are your own employees. And companies like LafargeHolcim and its companies in India – ACC and Ambuja have a program worldwide and in India, called Be Social Ambassadors, where employees if they are passionate volunteer to talk about the organisations new initiatives on their on social media channel and also in their networks. That becomes an interesting way of controlling the narrative if there is an issue at some end. The second part is how do you leverage your distribution network and your customers who can talk about their positive experiences. Micro-influencers, whether they are your employees, distribution network or customers are becoming critical to grow and leverage.

Your own media is the best way to control the narrative. I feel today that the website is underleveraged. We forget that social media can be a double-edged sword where somebody can negate you. But owned media like website can be the biggest channel to get public information to all your stakeholders.

Nikhil Dey: The two phrases I’m holding on to are stakeholders and bringing the narrative back on course. I recall a conversation a global communications leader was having with her management team that was trying to manage a crisis. She said, “Gentleman, let me correct you, we are not in the midst of a PR crisis, we are in the midst of an HR crisis that PR is helping manage.” It is important to take charge of the narrative internally with stakeholders otherwise everything becomes a ‘PR crisis’. Many a times we must call a spade a spade and not pass the blame, but pass the buck. Make sure we all own the problem. Then a decision needs to be made whether to be proactive or manage the crisis. The decision metrics need to evaluate whether this is an issue, or this is a crisis.

Meghana Dave: Luxury is all about exclusivity. While super luxury brands are owned by few, they are aspired to by everyone. Hence, it becomes an imperative for luxury brands to conduct themselves, whether it is online or offline. Let me share the example of my favourite brand – Burberry. This was in 2019 during the launch of their Autumn-Winter Runway collection which was featured at the London Fashion Week. There was a model who wore a hoodie with a noose around the neck. That got the public’s attention and the model was not comfortable wearing the garment. She went to social media and stated, ‘Suicide is not fashion’ and detailed that she had attempted to raise a concern about the clothing, but got dismissed.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt_e9OpgGG3/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

For something like this, a big brand like Burberry had to publicly apologise and very interestingly, they drafted a heartfelt statement and mentioned that they are determined to learn from this episode and mentioned that they have categorically spoken to all the stakeholders, employees and communities that have been impacted with this action.

Luxury brands don’t just foresee a crisis, but also advocate their commitment. Burberry introduced a diversity and inclusion initiative to raise cultural understanding and diversity of talent within the company and rolled out a mandatory unconscious bias training for employees globally. I would say that brands should take complete responsibility when things go wrong on social media and that should reflect in the present communication as well as future communication.

Amit Prabhu: In the Indian subcontinent, there is no sense of preparedness for a crisis beyond 5-10 per cent of companies. To stay ahead of a crisis, a lot of preparation needs to happen in terms of crisis manuals, FAQs and I talk to a lot of friends in corporate communications and PR who don’t have that because they feel they’ll wing it. There’s a lot of money in it – the million-dollar global PR companies make a lot of revenue in helping big brands prepare for crises – from playbooks to manuals and what not. If brands in India can work with their PR partners towards that end, then a lot of situations may be salvaged, and we can build better crisis response systems for the future.

Nikhil Dey: There are two reasons why preparation is important. The first reason is that it enables you to respond with speed. The second reason is that the mental ownership of a crisis is something that leadership teams take a while to get their hands around. Sometimes the crisis is not of a company’s making or fault. There’s a feeling that ‘we’re unfairly being targeted’ and ‘we’ve done nothing wrong’ and if you’ve prepared, you will get to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter whether you are to blame or not, but it is your brand under attack. What I’ve learnt is that these manuals are in place but not in use.

Emerging Narrative – Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG)

Shalini Singh: There must be an ESG narrative for all stakeholders. In India, we’re lucky because we’re perhaps a year and a half behind the climate change concerns that have taken charge of Europe, followed by other geographies. We will have a year and a half to get our communication narrative right. I think it is very important to quickly align to the global standards of integrated reporting. You have organisations in India who release a separate annual report, sustainability report and CSR report, where none of them are talking together. ESG means give me one communication that tells me about the impact you are creating across Environment, Social and Governance structure. Till you integrate these together, you are not talking the language of the investor or whoever is watching you. 90 per cent of Indian companies have not moved to integrated reporting. It is important to put pressure on teams to go for certain ESG indexes like Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DGSI), because until you have been evaluated by a third party, you don’t know where you really stand and you don’t have data to work on your ESG issues. Now, you may say this is a chief sustainability officer talking, but no, it is really a communications exercise.

Click here to watch the panel discussions.