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Crisis Management In The Media

CRiSIS Planning And Media COMMUNICATION EXPERTS

The Drill’s crisis management consultants make news headlines: Part of our crisis planning ethos is to try to help businesses shape the developing narrative via judicious media and stakeholder engagement, to take crisis-hit companies from unsafe ground to safer terrain.

Also, when crises break, media journalists/producers often ask Drill experts - all crisis management specialists - to offer insights and observations to boost understanding of the crisis communication issues at play. Our experts have vital international and hands-on crisis management consultancy expertise, which is transferred into our crisis management planning tools and crisis software.

Drawing on years of frontline crisis management consultancy, Drill staff enact crisis fixes and crisis solutions to help businesses overcome their PR and operational problems. Your crisis response plans can be improved just by reading some of the articles below, featuring our proprietary approaches and methodologies for crisis management puzzles. The articles do not constitute specific advice or counsel, but we believe their principles to be, without guarantee, thought-provoking! So when you’re ready for better crisis management planning or preparation, call us.

We hope you enjoy the read.

What's next after Crisis Simulation Exercises ?

Crisis management training (Australia) comes in many forms and varieties. While some crisis companies run desktop drills with felt pens and white paper, and others stage ‘theatrical simulations’ with locations and event actors, both these approaches can lack the digital technology inputs that are so typical of modern crises. Now, the most efficient crisis simulation has to be portable and participative; Hence why The Drill runs crisis simulation software - and crisis scenarios - in real-time on any laptop computer. So it’s quick, realistic, engaging and, some say, as close to the real thing as any crisis simulation exercise can be.

And while most crisis rehearsals are laudable by intent, crisis training courses are defined and valued by the learnings that accrue from them. Our Drill social media simulator, for example, offers crisis training courses that end with a ‘key learnings’ report. I.e. - a document which synthesises our observation of how the company coped with the crisis, and what they could do better as the crisis workshops proceeded!!

To foster better understanding of best-practice online and multi-media issues management, our crisis simulation templates and crisis reports match – as best as possible – our observations of the responses within the key steps of our proprietary crisis management methodology. It’s a proven crisis training method.

Our overall intent is to remind crisis management consultants and emergency and risk experts of the key steps – Research; Message formulation; Stakeholder information; Media response and Material dissemination - that are all required to minimise or negate the impact of the corporate crisis threats that impact on company, corporate and personal reputations. Our reports parallel the insights of the best class-leading crisis communication training certification available anywhere. It’s way more than Crisis Training 101.

So, again, this is a sample excerpt of a report that followed on from our crisis simulation scenarios. It’s essential that - after their bespoke crisis simulation exercises - our clients get the advice and steps they need to take their crisis management drills and issues management protocols to the best-practice level.

Overview Feedback:

Client XXXX would be relatively capable of responding to most modern media crises, largely due to the experience, skills and nous of the Comms Teams evidenced during our crisis simulation example. With a mix of practitioner expertise and some embedded technology processes, XXXX would manage most traditional media communications responses well under crisis circumstances. However they would do less well with many social media and other online sites (see appendix 3) as social media crisis exercise illustrated.

While some integrated/social media capabilities are evident, there are major resource gaps in how to fully optimise the response to a social media crisis scenario, especially from a search and SEO viewpoint (see appendix 3a).

Our topline crisis simulation exercise observations are that in this crisis management scenario, XXXX would respond adequately in more traditional channels, but less so with multimedia channels and content. Several key observations from this crisis communications management rehearsal include:

  • Not using social monitoring to forecast issues or liaise with social media crisis influencers

  • No embedded or documented company-wide processes for social media crisis management

  • No dedicated channel to share crisis management training ‘intel’ if an issue or incident arises

  • No effectively ‘intel filtering’ of content to help the crisis team command centre

  • XXXX rarely rehearses, plans or runs any crisis management drills in Australia, or key regions

  • XXXX admits its ‘content creation’ capabilities - to support its crisis team command - is low

  • No crisis management consultants (Australia) currently on standby or retainer for activation

Of course, here in this article, we won’t provide the crisis learning documents in their entirety, but we trust you can see how the crisis communications and crisis management learnings are specific to each organisation. We usually finish with the following…

Thanks for taking our crisis simulation exercises, XXXX. We hope you found the above insights useful and productive. We’d be happy to hear your feedback to this report and suggest that XXXX would benefit from a subsequent crisis simulation to test - and improve - its issues or crisis response plans and processes, particularly given there is currently no process with roles and responsibilities designated.

As we said at the start, crisis training courses are held valuable by the learnings that accrue from them. With our trans-media crisis simulation software - The Drill - the post-crisis findings are probably of equal value to the actual crisis drill itself. So when you’re ‘crisis planning’ please ensure your crisis simulation companies all offer a post-simulation evaluation report; it’s the key to helping you put in place the resources and processes that will help your brand when it faces its next crisis management situation.

Gerard McCusker