Public Relations 101: Crisis Communications

Anatomy of a Crisis

As public relations professionals, knowing the characteristics (or the anatomy) of a crisis is important as it will enable you to know when to take the necessary steps to mitigate it. The worse thing that can happen is for an organization to be in a crisis, not know it and continue with business as usual. Then by the time the organization realizes it is in a crisis, it will be in full crisis mode. As a general rule, the sooner an organization addresses a crisis, the better the chance of containing its impact.

Borrowing from the managerial acronym, the four main characteristics of a crisis are:

Volatility. What this means is that public reaction towards the issue can fluctuate significantly. It can be a case of one moment no one is talking about it, and the next the organization is being flamed by thousands of netizens. Issues that affect an organization that does not have the possibility of this dynamic range of reaction is not considered a crisis. This is because slow-burn issues can be managed via normal business processes.

Uncertainty. When we talk about uncertainty, we are talking about the unpredictability of the issue. In other words, no one knows what trajectory it will take. One minute, public reaction towards the issue could be about the incident, the…