How to Start a Business Blog, Part 10: Crisis Management Plan

This is part 8 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging.

Sooner or later, your company will experience a crisis. It could be a customer service crisis. It could be a financial crisis. It could be a natural disaster in your region. Whatever it is, tell me: where will people go in order to learn what’s going on?

That’s right: your website. And what will they see when they arrive at your website, hoping for the latest information freshly posted only minutes ago just like they get on so many other websites?

If you said “the same static marketing-speak page we’ve had up since 1997,” that would be what we in the biz call “the wrong answer.”

Alright, let me get my tongue out of my cheek and get serious. A company blog is probably the best crisis management tool you will ever have. During any kind of crisis, people will eagerly wait for every post that updates them on the situation. Stony silence and traditional communications channels are going to hurt you. Big time. Dell learned this the hard way when they started handing out grenades cleverly disguised as latptop batteries. Kryptonite bike locks learned this the hard way when it was discovered that their locks could be compromised with a simple ball point pen, and video of it spread across the internet. Kryptonite’s response was to shove its collective head further into the sand. Their reputation was ruined, not by their badly designed bike locks, but by the way they so poorly handled the crisis.

Even if your company has never had a blog before, if a crisis hits, whip through the decisions I’m going to outline below and set up a blog immediately. Put a big fat link to it from your home page. Manage the crisis through to the end, and then you can figure out what to do with the blog and your site.

Creating a Blog Crisis Management Plan

1. Decide who is going to do the crisis blogging.
   If your company has multiple bloggers, but you want only one voice to be the official source during the crisis, then have the other bloggers link to the main source of crisis information and then defer to that source. If you want your multiple bloggers to cover the crisis, then make sure they have access to information so that nobody is posting at cross-purposes with each other or with the company. Set up a central information hub for your bloggers through email or RSS.
2. Decide what you’re going to say and, just as importantly, what you’re not going to say.
   Normally, I’m adverse to bringing lawyers into anything about blogging, but in a crisis you may want their advice. That doesn’t mean it will be any good or that you have to follow it. Especially if their advice will cause you to lose customers and create an even worse public relations nightmare. If they tell you not to say anything at all, get new lawyers who understand the internet and the new rules. The most important thing is to talk to people in your blog like you are a human being and your audience members are, too. If someone pushes you to speak to something you’ve decided not talk about, be polite but firm and ask for their understanding and patience.
3. Decide whether you’re going to allow comments during the crisis.
   If you really get blogging, you will of course allow comments on your company blog. Depending on the nature of the crisis situation, you may want to temporarily turn off commenting. There may be perfectly good reasons to do so, time and manpower being two of them. However, you will be missing out on the greatest opportunity to really show your customers how awesome you can be by how you respond to and handle comments on crisis blog posts. When the shit hits the fan is your biggest chance to impress, to win people over, to win them for life. I suggest you take that chance.
4. Use traditional media to your advantage.
   Inform your traditional media contacts that crisis information will be available from the blog, and that they can treat each post as a press release.
5. Make sure your web servers can handle the traffic surge.
   You may not have had all that much traffic before, but a crisis can send a tsunami of traffic that will crash your web servers in no time flat. Make sure you’re prepared: upgrade your hosting service or your own equipment if you maintain in-house. If you pay for hosting, contact your hosting representative immediately when the crisis starts and let them know they’ll need to be able to handle a spike.

If you think all of this sounds overly serious, I have one word for you: Mattel. Here is their recall page. What a bunch of corporate crap. Don’t you feel safer already for your kids? Me neither. Can you imagine how powerful a blog would be for this? How it could win people’s trust back even stronger than before? Apparently, Mattel can’t.