The Relationship Of Public Relations With Crisis Communication & Management

Crisis communication and management is the procedure through which an organisation copes with aa hugely unpredictable problematic situation that threatens to harm the organisation, the stakeholders and the customers and the general public as well.

Public Relations is a field that has a got a lot to do with maintaining public image for high-profile people, commercial businesses and organisations, non-profit associations or programs. Public relations concerned people working to put through a public message and then shape the message for communication, community relations, crisis communications, crisis management, customer relations, employee relation, and government affairs. Industry relations, media relation, mediation, publicity, speech writing and visitor relations.

How is public relations related to crisis communication?

There has been so many public relations crisis in the past and these are some steps that should be implemented in order to put a check on them.

The organisation that is in crisis should be prompt enough to address the internal and the external public immediately once the crisis has to come to knowledge. The one quality that should be maintained by the organisation that is facing the crisis is honesty. Honesty should always be maintained by the organisation because the public forgives the honest than a calculated lie.

It is also mandatory for the organisation to be informative as far as possible because if they donot provide ample information to the public the media will make up their own opinion and give birth to rumours. Such rumours can cause more damage to the reputation of the organisation in question. The next important thing to do is to display concern and show then that you care because if this is done properly the people will be more forgiving.

Each crisis situation is unique in itself and it requires a custom-made crisis communication.

Let me put forth an example of Diet Pepsi and the controversy it surrounded itself in. Diet Pepsi got into trouble when the consumers started to find foreign objects in Diet Pepsi cans. A variety of different objects were found including syringes, a bullet and even a crack cocaine vial. The organisation knew that there was no possible ways for these objects to be inserted during the manufacturing or the bottling process for that matter. Thus resultantly Diet Pepsi used a defensive approach and it claimed its innocence. They communicated with the public and quite openly at that. They also attacked the accusers and made sure that their bottling process was shown on the news.

There were a lot of successful public relation crisis communication and management, however one can’t just overlook all the mishaps that took place when talking about crisis communication and public relations and hence it is always advisable to be prepared and use effective Public relations in order to alleviate any crisis which would ultimately culminate into a good crisis communication program.

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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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