Archives for 2022

We are often asked, “What is crisis management?” and “What are the stages of crisis management?” This blog article strikes at the core of what to know and how to act.

Here is a crisis: Your business doesn’t have a crisis communication plan in the back pocket. If this is true, it is past time to plan and assemble one, so you’ll be better equipped to manage all potential crises that could be looming.

Don’t know where to start? Let’s begin by exploring strategic crisis communication plans and why every business needs one.

 What is a Crisis Communication Plan?

 In a time of crisis, how a business strategically communicates with its clients or customers, key stakeholders, media members, and general public (A.K.A., crisis communication) directly reflects how the occurring crisis plays out. Additionally, success in these precarious situations is defined by how well the company effectively communicates – immediately and productively – and recovers in the long run. To that end, a crisis communication plan brings order to the chaos by providing a set of guidelines for a business to follow and execute at the onset and throughout the duration of a crisis.

The purpose of any good crisis communication plan is to provide a general resource and guide to company leadership regarding the fundamental tenets of effective communications during times of extreme difficulty, upheaval or calamity. The plan, once developed, also provides strategies for messaging development and management as well as insights for addressing or interfacing with all critical and impacted groups, including social media users and print, online, digital, and broadcast media members during crises.

Why is a Crisis Communication Plan Important?

Given the current volatility of world affairs and the magnifying spotlight placed on companies via social media, more companies than ever are seeking public relations and marketing agencies with expert crisis communication services and the acumen needed for developing and executing effective crisis communication plans. Whether it be an established corporation or an emerging start-up business, an organization’s success is neither definite nor impervious to the consequences often arising from a crisis.

While the mere thought of a crisis for a business or brand may be distressing, developing an effective crisis communication plan can help your company weather the storm of any crisis to better ensure an outcome with less turmoil, fewer mistakes and minimized repercussions.

Ultimately, develop a plan before crises happen.

How to Create a Crisis Communication Plan

The 5 Cs of Crisis Communication

 All judicious program plans for a business should have supportive frameworks, and a crisis communication plan is no exception. Above all, create a crisis management handbook.

Before developing a crisis communication plan, it is vital to first understand the basic principles which provide its support: Care, Commitment, Competency, Channels, and Continuity.

Care: A crisis is no time to showcase actions and communication that are characterized by a lack of good sense, seriousness and worthwhile purpose. If your communication fails to demonstrate the proper care the situation demands, innumerable problems will arise exacerbating the crisis at hand. Create a crisis communication plan that meticulously and thoughtfully addresses all pertinent groups and their potential needs. Consider, assess and include your employees, stakeholders and investors, customer or client segments, reporters and journalists, influencers, and all other audiences germane to your business.

Commitment: Illustrate a commitment to resolving the crisis and all its effects, as well as mitigating the chance of its reoccurrence. Moreover, committing to timely and frequent communication with all publics, including those with the power to positively or negatively alter the outcome for your business, is an essential characteristic of effectively handling a crisis. Your plan should lay the groundwork, anticipating and outlining the ways in which you, your C-suite and public relations agency will lead during the crisis versus being victimized or scandalized by it.

Competency: Audiences will render their judgments by gauging how well your company or representatives conduct messaging online and perform in front of the media. If you come across as capable through direct interactions with your audiences and communities as well as competent during interviews with the media, these forms of demonstrated insightfulness regarding all matters of the crisis will increase the chances you and the company will be deemed proficient.

Channels: Knowing where to communicate is just as important as knowing what to communicate. Well before a crisis, conduct an audience analysis. If you think you understand all the detailed specifics about your key audiences, consider if you and your leadership team have unearthed exactly how and where these integral groups tend to obtain their important information. If not, your crisis communication plan should involve an exploration of message dissemination that will actually reach your constituents.

Continuity: When planning and executing a crisis communication plan, clear and sustaining message continuity should be top of mind. For example, if a social media post does not exactly match up with the words of your CEO, audience misconceptions may occur, and your ability to control the narrative will diminish. The spoken and written word should always correspond during a crisis. When it comes to continuity, more C’s play an adjacent role; communications with correctness and consistency will strengthen the trust factor among your audiences, giving them an increased level of confidence in how your business is managing the crisis.

These 5+ Cs should be at the heart of every message delivered to your audiences, especially in a time of crisis. You will only be prepared to do so with an advanced plan developed before a crisis, not during one. It is vital to know and execute these principles while understanding the significance of each. Plan, plan and plan ahead; because, without these pillars, there is no ground on which you and your business can stand during the crisis.

Four Essential Elements of a Crisis Communication Plan

 Now that our foundation is set, let’s explore the essential elements of a crisis communication plan. While not an exhaustive list, the following elements are common themes of the best and most productive crisis communication plans.

Assess potential crises: It’s impossible to foresee every potential crisis looming over your business. However, it is possible to identify universal business threats as well as brainstorm the types of crises that frequently arise within your industry and/or sector. From there, every potential crisis should be assessed in terms of the “what if” scenario, along with a preplanned strategy attached.

 The focus of this portion of the plan should involve an assessment of crisis levels in terms of probable or likely dissemination of inaccurate or negative information that is based upon incidents, consumer opinions, hearsay, or propaganda, and that which can create communication issues and adversely affect the company’s reputation and brand perception. Usually, four levels of crisis are evaluated. Our PR team utilizes the following for most of our applicable clients’ crisis communications:

Level 1 = Most Serious or Most Potential Risk or Impact

Level 2 = Moderate Potential Risk or Impact

Level 3 = Low Risk or Impact

Level 4 = Unlikely Risk or Impact

Choose a spokesperson and create a crisis communication team: Who shall speak on behalf of your business when a crisis suddenly emerges? – You? Your CEO? When a crisis hits, the public narrative wastes no time being formed; therefore, you won’t have a second to waste. Decide and include your company’s spokesperson within your crisis communication plan and be ready to address internal and external groups and the media as soon as possible; and, this means quickly.

Your crisis communication plan must include what we like to call “The Line of Defense Team,” comprising leadership personnel who have been educated in the elements of your crisis communication plan. Each participant should have a copy of the plan accessible at all times with listed or charted individual and premeditated responsibilities.

Develop the plan as a workflow with each leader’s scope of responsibility clearly explained to encompass pre-crisis plan management and maintenance as well as activities and duties to handle during the crisis. Aspects of anticipated post-crisis administration are also wise to incorporate into the plan. These prewritten, general action items and timelines are intended to help your business leadership assess, address and attempt to resolve communication issues in regard to projected incidents.

Know your audience: Your audience is more than those who regularly comment on your Instagram posts. Companies commonly approach crisis communication with an exclusive focus on their customers and communities, showing little regard for their employees and other internal stakeholders. When developing and executing a crisis communication plan, make sure no stone is left unturned when identifying and communicating with your audience.

Identify your audience groups regarding whether they have direct or indirect interest versus influence. Consider your various audience types in terms of their “interest” or “influence.” Depending upon the type of crisis, select segments will hold general interest in the crisis and its related information, though with minor applicability for gains or losses. At the other end of the audience spectrum, a highly relevant group will not only have interest; they will also possess a great deal of influence over how they handle, address or speak about the crisis.

An individual crisis will require an assessment of segments and their figurative or actual stakeholder positions in comparison to potential positive, negative or neutral influence. This is integral to making decisions about how closely to interface with the segments and how often communications are required.

Develop consistent and succinct messaging on all channels: Nowadays, companies disseminate information via an expanding variety of communication channels (e.g., social media, onsite messaging, broadcast television, press conferences, emails, etc.). While having and employing different channels of communication is an essential part of an effective crisis communication plan, developing consistent and succinct messaging across said channels is just as important.

Execute the Crisis Communication Plan in a Time of Need

The cardinal rule of crisis communication is similar to medical operations. “First, do no harm.” Kick off your plan immediately.

When it comes to executing a crisis communication plan: timing is everything. Companies that create and maintain crisis communication plans in advance of being needed will be in a better position to control the public narrative.

Implementing your plan involves the opportunity for you and your company leaders and agency to prevent ineffective, unfavorable or detrimental responses to serious crises. Moreover, appropriate crisis communication procedures inspire or beget the trust and confidence that are vital in a challenging situation.

The 24-hour news channels and nontraditional media, vlogs, blogs, and social media can propel a news story or cycle that makes it critical for organizations to actively prepare for crisis communications.

An actual crisis often involves a volatile combination of public reaction and gossip or hearsay. This form of destabilized information makes it essential to give careful thought, albeit expedited, to information that will be stated or distributed, before making public releases or comments. This refers to the gamut- from social media posts to news conferences.

Evaluate the environment into which statements or information should be introduced, so your plan’s drafted messages can be further crafted and shaped to fit the problem or disaster.

Ask these critical questions at the onset:

• Is my crisis communication plan’s primary lead up to date about the matter and beginning to deploy the workflow?
• Which intel is critical to convey to prompt appropriate public responses in terms of the crisis?
• What are the opportunities for successful communications, and how can they be managed and maximized?
• What are the messages to be delivered prior to, during and after the incident?
• Are there obstacles to efficient crisis communications, and how can they be minimized?
• How might/will the media cover the news related to the crisis, and what are the ways in which to work with reporters?
• What questions can be expected from customers, vendors, employees, the public, media members, etc. throughout the situation?

Schedule the first and quick phone conference or meeting with your crisis management team to begin dissecting and dealing with the state of affairs. Rate and review the crisis situation to determine if your prewritten plan’s list of initiation items for management and communication is viable based on the present conditions.

Your plan’s pre-drafted message templates and statements should be finalized as necessary to address emergencies or other timely communications. Move forward with specific statements that could be needed to address individuals, peers, colleagues, or family members of impacted or potentially affected persons, to follow possible statements to and for the media and general public or suitable communities.

In the moments to days that follow, work through the “response” section of your crisis communication plan with the help of your leadership colleagues and public relations agency. From notifying the applicable parties and stabilizing the physical setting to activating your team and their workflow, stay calm and be focused.

What are Examples of Business Crises?

Let’s consider Pepsi and the infamous Kendal Jenner commercial that tried to settle racial injustice and police brutality with a simple can of Pepsi.

Watch the video here

Shortly after this commercial went live, Pepsi and Kendal Jenner faced severe backlash for trivializing the social issue. Nevertheless, Pepsi wasted no time by quickly pulling the ad and offering a statement of apology. While some negative sentiment may still reside, Pepsi’s overall crisis communication plan highlights the timeliness and sincerity needed for preserving the integrity and reputation of a brand in the face of a crisis.

BP Plc., on the other hand, did nothing of the sort. When an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, resulting in the deaths of 11 people and an environmental disaster, BP Plc. was slow in responding to the media, taking three whole days to verify and relay the cause of the explosion. Moreover, BP’s top management failed to address stakeholder and public concerns in a timely manner during the fallout of the crisis. Consequences? — A brand reputation tarnished and in need of restorative action.

If you want to have a say over the narrative and emerge from a crisis with your brand reputation intact, develop and roleplay your crisis communication plan well before a crisis presents itself. Then, deploy your plan – modifying or customizing it as needed – at the moment you become aware of the situation.

Conclusion

Threats are everywhere, surrounding everyone and everything, including companies with renowned success and rock-solid reputations. While it may not be a miscalculated commercial or an environmental disaster, a crisis can hit your business at any moment.

An effective crisis communication plan derives its framework from the five Cs as explained in this narrative and comprises all the essential elements with no stone left unturned. Do not put off until tomorrow what you and your business can do today to become prepared and properly equipped to manage a crisis and its ensuing chaos.

Contact our public relations team to learn more about an effective crisis communication plan specific to your business and brand.

Influencer marketing, just in the U.S., is estimated to surpass $4 billion in 2022. With these numbers exponentially growing, it is safe to say that companies are picking up on influencer culture’s effectiveness and consumer impact. With this in mind, it’s important for company marketing teams to know how they can stay up to date with new influencer marketing trends, especially with the branding benefits involved in the newer and burgeoning styles of video and audio content.

What are Influencers, and Why are They Important?  

The idea of influencers revolves around popular public figures or celebrities being paid to endorse a business’s products or services, with the goal being to expand brand awareness and key messaging throughout their industries and among the customer or consumer followers or fans who admire them.

In this space, influencers are typically categorized as either micro-influencers or macro-influencers based on their respective reach. Micro-influencers are typically those with 1,000-100,000 followers, while macro-influencers capture audiences ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of followers.

While it is important to consider reach in deciding which influencers to use, the value of influencers comes from their recognition as experts in their fields. Being held in such high regard creates trust in these creators, resulting in endorsements regularly increasing marketing engagement, presence and effectiveness. Whether the marketing objective is engaging with business-to-business prospects or reaching business-to-consumer targets, influencer marketing is a significant strategy marketing managers should maximize in 2022.

Leveraging Podcasts through Influencers

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, podcasting as a media outlet, has exploded with 80 million weekly American listeners, per Buzzsprout. The format’s ever-growing presence, combined with its ease of access, makes influencer marketing through podcasts a seemingly untapped gold mine.

Podcasts are unique in that they attract extremely loyal listeners in incredibly niche audiences. One example is that of industry trade shows, being one of the categories sometimes under the radar. Trade shows often host podcasts for business audiences to convey information about specific events, news and information for and within specific industry trades. These podcasts can help drive event registration as well as interest or sales for the trade show’s exhibited products or services.

Appropriately contracting influencers in this category of industry-specific podcasts can be extremely helpful for a company. Retaining influencers for trade show and other business-to-business podcasts can involve benefitting from the influencers’ third-party and positive commentary that includes key mentions or insights about the contracting company and its unique selling propositions. The same can be true of business-to-consumer events and podcasts.

As these podcasts are primarily funded by sponsors, similar to radio, they incorporate branded messages into their episodes, creating a perfect opportunity for paid influence. However, while radio sponsorships only occur live, podcasts are recorded and posted on streaming services, meaning, your company’s message stays in their segments for good.

Similarly, affiliate marketing with podcast influencers has become a popular practice in this space. By incentivizing creators to promote your service or product, in exchange for a percentage of business or sales received, influencers often go the extra mile with acknowledging your brand multiple times to increase their take from the partnership. Or, influencers can be funded with a one-time fee in exchange for an agreed type of endorsement or positive opinion or perspective they communicate.

From a marketing standpoint, affiliate marketing is not only the most common form; but, it is the most effective, with 29% of all podcast listeners saying they have used a promotion they heard about during an episode, according to a study by NCSolutions.

In a different lens, influencers can also be paid by companies to do guest appearances on industry or topic-focused podcasts. Having a guest influencer on an already existing podcast with a substantial following can further enhance a message’s effectiveness. While some podcast producers or hosts may not prefer to interview a business’s marketing executive (some do, and some do not), influencers are desired guests on podcasts because all parties benefit from their presence. Both the guest and the host show draw viewers towards one another while they promote conversation about your business.

Adding Virality of Short-Form Videos with Influencers

Those who work in the media industry have become aware of short-form video’s rapid growth since its inception into social media in 2013. Yet, it took years, until the boom of TikTok, that marketing teams began to use the style as a tool to promote themselves through popular creators. Since the concept has been spread to other platforms, it is bigger than it ever has been with a 2022 marketing trends survey, conducted by HubSpot, finding that 30% of marketers who use social media plan to invest in short-form videos.

TikTok and Instagram are the two largest platforms where short-form video marketing often occurs through the implementation of influencers. These influencer video applications’ marketing sphere can be centered around business-to-consumer marketing and/or business-to-business marketing. When well-managed and monitored by your public relations agency, influencer videos can easily create tenfold return-on-investment.

On both video-oriented platforms, sponsored collaborations dominate the business-to-consumer game. Popular influencers often sport merchandise or show off using consumer goods and products as they either create content around current trends or simply provide short testimonials or reviews geared toward the consumer or e-commerce follower audiences.

For a business-to-business approach, this style of influential videos is all about industry savvy influencers creating short video blogs or “vlogs” about their own positive experiences with specific products or professional service providers. The created videos and vlogs can provide real-time influencer insight on specific aspects of products or services for businesses, which has the power to intrigue business professionals who are decision-makers about purchasing products or procuring service providers for their businesses or the businesses for which they work.

Affiliate marketing, also, is seen as extremely effective in these areas through special influencer-based UTM codes and the announcement of special promotions or offers with calls for action. When influencers post content about your business or brand, you should ask or require them to include a UTM code to track any conversions or sales they induce. The premise is a pay-back or payout in the form of a small commission for each conversion they generate. This can be an event registration for a tradeshow or other event, or it might be a product or service purchase brought about and linked to the influencer’s created content.

The upside to these two specific platforms is their algorithm-based targeted content. While on other platforms, you must research how to attract certain audiences to your posts and account, TikTok and Instagram Reels constantly showcase new material to viewers based on what they interact with, who they follow and what kinds of content they regularly pay attention to. Meaning, that if you choose influencers correctly within your industry, others who look at similar content will more likely be shown or delivered this influencer and your brand.

All of this is only as good and results oriented as your or your agency’s management of your business’s influencer marketing program, strategy and agreements.

Connecting with Online Communities through Live Streaming and Influencers

Live broadcasting, or live streaming, is also accessible through various digital platforms and has become one of the highest grossing mediums available. When your influencers broadcast or stream content about your business or that which makes your organization distinctive, the interest and click-through rate exponential increases.

What the live streaming community offers that other media formats don’t is real-time interaction between influencers and their audiences, which creates a stronger bond and allows more information to be presented for those interested. This exchange makes the application of this format handy when promoting an event and/or a brand, product or service.

Seen especially in younger audiences, Grin found that some audiences on YouTube are influenced more by popular YouTubers than by celebrities.

Allowing your audience an insider or third-party view of an event or tradeshows, a sneak peak of a new product, or how a professional service is performed and yields benefit creates a sense of interest or intrigue and engages them to learn more.

For many event marketing teams, hosting an onsite livestream which features influencers as guests or hosts can provide this effect. Influencer-based live streams offer expert analysis of not just the event itself, but the products or services being showcased at the event, which can draw in viewers or attendees based on each influencer’s following.

When business-to-business events, conferences or exhibitions take place, livestreams are one of the most promising ideas for enticing new clientele or attendees to register. Many tradeshow and event organizers have to market their event’s benefits through associations and businesses whose members or personnel have attended in the past to validate the events worth for others to register and attend. In the influencer space, these trusted individuals can provide an even deeper level of event approval to an effective audience, persuading their followers and fans simply based upon their involvement in the sector and event via verbalized or shown experiences.

Tips for Video and Audio-Based Influencer Marketing Strategies

While employing these formats of video and audio media with an influencer can help expand the reach and visibility of your company, the most important part comes with properly executing your social media influencer marketing strategy.

Here are a couple key tips on how you can start making your influencer marketing campaign more effective.

Limit Scripting but Guide Soundbites: Whether it be demonstrations, sponsored messaging, or product videos for marketing, a common mistake many companies make is over-scripting for influencers.

While tempting to write exactly what you want them to say, these types of scripts restrict the creator, making the message feel ingenuine and out of character to their audience. Allowing influencers leeway to use their own voice and style in creating sponsored messages, reviews, tutorials or commenting often results in higher levels of audience engagement.

However, giving your influencers a messaging guide is essential. This can include what tone to use, what points and topics should be covered or a length estimate. Create a list of important soundbites, being concise, clear language and subject-matter you would like for them to incorporate into their content. Provide message and brand standards to ensure proper and correct information is shared, which also helps avoid inadvertent content that could confuse the audience or conflict with your objectives.

Appoint someone with a true and seasoned understanding of influencer marketing on your staff or with your marketing agency to work closely with and oversee your contracted influencers.

Participate In Trends: Influencers who participate in popular social media tends while showcasing your brand, and integrating popular captions at the time of creation, automatically sets the algorithm of the platform to favor their content, especially on Instagram and TikTok. In accurately researching popular trends, your influencers can create content around the topics and captions they should use, leading to more people likely seeing and following your business or brand.

Any given social media site normally contains an algorithm which determines what an audience is shown. These complex equations take into account a user’s interests and learns preferred topics over time through providing new content and achieving either positive or negative responses. While this cycle helps in targeting specific audiences, within these spaces virality is also key to the algorithm.

While the topic of influencer marketing geared to generate visibility of positive online content can involve a significant amount of time and energy, the payoff can be extremely rewarding to businesses when properly vetted and managed. Some companies make mistakes because they either lack awareness of popular influencer trends or how to incorporate and oversee them, or, they simply try too hard to play into a specific topic versus facilitate an innovative, yet macro-view, of influencer content.

The aid of influencers and public relations agencies can add much needed leverage to these styles of podcast and video campaigns because of their extensive platform-specific knowledge on what is captivating or entertaining to their followers and fans.

A great example of this type of influencer-based knowledge comes from TikTok’s ‘Sounds’. While many marketing teams or companies would need to spend extensive time researching which sounds are popular at a specific time or how they could incorporate them into brand messaging, creators have an innate ability to understand and customize them across their respective platforms. This brings about a natural flow of persuasive information about the products or services and brands for which businesses are seeking promotion.

The introduction of influencers into any marketing campaign can feasibly produce more engagement and interest in your products or services because of the community built around the trustworthy creators. To stay relevant and provide authentic content which is also effective, it is important to have awareness surrounding current media trends like short-form videos, podcasts and live streaming as well as how to apply and monitor these trends to appeal to your audience. Even if influencer marketing, videos and podcasts are not the forte for some internal marketing teams, this is no reason to avoid adding them to an annual integrated marketing plan. Public relations firm services can provide the tools necessary to develop and perform successful influencer marketing campaigns to grow and benefit your company and its levels of influence.

At Eberly & Collard Public Relations, we develop and manage influencer marketing programs for our clients by carefully researching, acquiring and managing top influencers that are the most beneficial for their brands. Contact us if you are looking to kick-off a new or improved influencer marketing program. Learn more: www.ecpr.com.