What to do when a crisis knocks your door

What to do when a crisis is installed? Should you be proactive or reactive?

As I have said in a previous post, for businesses in general, they should delight their audience through their blogs focusing on:

• Solving their audience problems (bringing solutions).
• Providing recommendations.
• Being enthusiastic and fun.
• Providing information that is needed, that will save time and money of their readers.

The three pillars of customer delight are: innovation, communication, and education. Producing content that will raise awareness, will educate, will inform them somehow according to their needs (Maslow hierarchy of needs). It is not what you say, but how you make them feel. However, when a crisis is installed, many companies hide from the media or attack the media. They send the wrong message in the wrong time.

The best strategy in my opinion is to keep doing exactly what the company was doing before, being transparent, opened, and proactive, instead of adopting a defensive posture. You need to foresee what is coming by tracking your customers interactions and their demands, being present and active on social media, in this way you can sense the market, the conversations, the media, and can be proactive rather than reactive.

More important is to apply the same enthusiasm you use to sell your product to also solve a problem, being realistic and giving feasible deadlines. A good way to go is displaying the transparency flag, inviting the media to your house (your company) so to demonstrate that you actually do not have anything to hide.

For those who followed the “pink slime” crisis, I believe the Public Relations of the company took actions, but the timing was wrong. You need to sense a crisis coming from kilometers of distance, but if you did not see it coming, the best to do in these circumstances is try to respond the faster you can. That is not only a strategy, but a sign of respect to your customers too.

In the case of “pink slime” or “lean finely textured beef” (LFTB), people buy beef, they have kids, and they are rightly worried about how dangerous the LFTB can be. The lack of information about the LFTB, followed by the silence only increases anxiety. Therefore, companies should talk without fear, re-visit their mission, vision and values and talk from their heart. If you did wrong apologize and do your best to bring solutions in the shortest time possible. Be ethic, honest, accountable, and sincere in your actions and your words, and everything is gonna be fine. What do you think? I would be glad to hear from you. So, how is the best way to overcome a crisis in your opinion?