Crisis Management and PR

The nature of crisis management in PR is made up if two words danger and opportunity meaning that an organization needs to be able to spot a crisis when an issue arises that has the risk or tendency to become dangerous and cause a potential issue for the organization.

With organizations such as BP and Toyota to show us what not to do by either keeping quiet like the case of BP, and allowing people to come to their own conclusions and run with them and in the age of social media it barely took days for Facebook pages asking people to boycott BP began to pop up. To date there are more than 20 boycott BP pages on Facebook with the biggest having more than 815,000 members. Or Toyota who sat back and waited and gave every other reason in the world for the issues their cars were having.

On the other hand we have other companies who have given great examples of crises management and have even avoided the crisis completely by acting as fast as possible case in point Johnson & Johnson and their Tylenol crises. In 1982 Tylenol was tampered with. Someone had been placing cyanide pills inside of Tylenol bottles, and it was killing people. Johnson & Johnson reacted quickly and pulled their product off the selves. Instead of suffering long-term damage to their reputation, Tylenol regained consumer confidence quickly because their crisis management plan told them to act in the interest of the consumers.

Every corporation needs to have a crisis management plan and its even more important now than ever because the consumers have platforms now that are more powerful than ever so poorly handled crisis management isn't a risk that organizations can afford anymore especially when their reputations are on the line.