Accidents and mistakes are part of being human. You cannot get through life without tripping and skimming your knee at least once, and you will disappoint someone at some point by forgetting something.
Equally, a business cannot exist that does not face crises now and then.
Mistakes, misunderstandings, accidents, product failures, and employee misconduct are all risks that businesses face regularly. Although they're nearly impossible to avoid, they can be managed.
If your business is well prepared and vigilant, you can foresee potential risks and prevent many of them from escalating into major crises. If managed especially well, few outside your crisis response team will even know something happened.
A carefully compiled crisis communications guide can literally save your business when the inevitable occurs.
The key to remember is that there's no universal crisis handbook you can order and put on your shelf.
Every business is different and what needs to be in your response plan will require careful research, documentation, and frequent revision. It must also be flexible and evolve with your business.
If you're feeling a little anxious because you don't have an up-to-date crisis guide, it's ok. During PR Newswire’s April 27th webinar Navigating a Crisis: Top Tips on How to Protect your Reputation, we’ll share top crisis communications firms’ advice for handling crises and protecting the brand reputation you’ve worked so hard to develop.
In the meantime, though, here are three steps to take right now that will kick-start your planning before a crisis strikes.
List Your Vulnerabilities
The only way to be prepared for a crisis, or perhaps avoid one altogether, is to have an understanding of the types of crises you might face.
This list will be unique for every business.
For example, if your business requires employees to use dangerous machinery or chemicals, your risks will differ from those of a business dealing with online sales.
Some general risks to start with include: systems outages (order processing or email), product failure, human error, dissatisfied customer reviews or social posts, employee misconduct, lawsuits, and communications faux pas.
Furthermore, look at any crises you dealt with in the past. While you may have permanently resolved some of them, there are others that will likely pop up again.
After making your initial list, group vulnerabilities into types such as Personnel, Customer, Legal, Financial, etc. Ensure the list is as thorough as possible by collaborating with key parties in your business who have other perspectives to add.
Chart Your Critical Contacts
When a crisis hits, you need to immediately get the word out to the right people across your organization. That means knowing – in advance – whom to inform.
Create a chart listing the key contacts in the event of a crisis. Start at the top of your company and then categorize people into escalation groups.
List those who should always be informed immediately, such as your head of communications (perhaps that's you). Then, categorize other essential people who may need to be involved on a situational basis, like your legal team, senior executives, heads of information security and IT, sales leaders, etc.
Although your list of contacts must be thorough, you should be judicious when involving people during the actual crisis. You want to take as few people as possible away from their daily work. Plan well, but carefully select the response team based on needs.
Audit Your Communications Channels
With certain crises, you will need to halt your usual daily chatter on social media or post an update on your website's homepage. It's important to know how to make that happen quickly.
Most companies have multiple — if not dozens or even hundreds of — social media accounts, websites, customer lists, vendor lists, partner lists, media lists, and other public-facing communications channels.
You'll want to work with the people you normally trust on these channels to respond to questions and post information. Don't replace them with a senior spokesperson who is unfamiliar with the nuances of your channels and their audiences.
Compile a list of all of your current communications channels, as well as the key contacts for those channels. You don't need to hold all the passwords (those change), but you do need to know whom to contact.
If you've prepared ahead of time, everyone will know exactly what procedures to follow and you won't find yourself scrambling at the last minute. Don't forget, though:
Every crisis communications plan needs a backup plan.
If you have one person in your business who manages all your social channels and holds the passwords, ensure they have a well-informed backup who can handle situations when they're camping with no cell reception in the Smokey Mountains.
Bonus Tip: Regularly Revisit the Plan
Information gets outdated very quickly. Set a schedule to re-audit your vulnerabilities, key contacts, and communications channels frequently.
This can be time-consuming and difficult to stay on top of so be sure to share the burden.
Everyone who manages a responsibility or channel should be responsible for keeping others up to date on access information and personnel changes.
Also, remember that there is no better time to update your crisis guide than right after each crisis. As communicators, we learn something from every incident that will make the process of managing a crisis easier 'next time.'
These three things are a great place to start with your crisis communications plan, but don't stop there! Keep the momentum going and build it out. It may not happen all at once. In fact, it should grow and evolve as your business ages and you learn from future crises.
Learn more about planning and executing a crisis communication plan during PR Newswire's next webinar Navigating a Crisis: Top Tips on How to Protect your Reputation on Wednesday, April 27 at 1 PM ET.
During this presentation, Karen Doyne, Managing Director and Leader U.S. Crisis Practice at Burson-Marsteller, and Patrick Hillmann, Senior Vice President at LEVICK, will discuss:
How to get internal and external stakeholders aligned on your brand's message
What to do during the onset of a crisis
How to monitor perception and sentiment throughout a crisis
Click here to register and follow @PRNewswire on Twitter during the live tweeting session.
Author Victoria Harres is vice president, strategic communications and content at PR Newswire. Her team leads social media, PR, creative and blogging for the brand. Vicky was the original twitterer on @PRNewswire and continues to be part of that crew. If she's not at her desk, you'll likely find her in the garden.
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Abiding by the best practices of modern content marketing, you need to include a visual with every piece of content your brand distributes. Depending on the scope of your content production and distribution strategy, that can quickly add up to a lot of graphics.
Stock photos and illustrations can provide a cost-effective way to help you meet today's creative demands, but the search for quality images can still take some time.
To help you find what you need faster, I'm sharing my best tips along with some expert advice from Robyn Lange, Curator and Photo Editor at Shutterstock, a leading global provider of digital imagery.
1. Rethink stock imagery’s reputation
Thanks to a flood of low quality and downright bad images available online, stock imagery sometimes gets a bad rap.
I asked Lange what she might say to stock photo haters to get them to change their perspective.
"I would counter the negative with a positive by directing the naysayers to the 'Featured Collections' that I curate for our website," she says. "The main focus of my job is to pull out the absolute best content from our vast and varied collection and make it easily accessible. 80 million assets can be daunting, but there are some truly unique and beautiful gems to be found. I think that once brands start to see what is available to them they will change their minds about the state of stock imagery."
Save time by setting up an account with a stock provider that offers packages which fit your visual needs in quality, budget, and flexibility (i.e., subscription or pay-as-you-go).
To narrow down the field, run several searches within each tool based on your common content topics, and then compare results based on ease-of-use, topic relevancy and image quality.
2. Aim for authenticity
Awkward poses, silly props and those over-excited office workers – it's easy to pick out really bad stock photos because they just look fake.
Customers value a brand that presents itself in an authentic way. To match expectations, make sure you select imagery that feels natural.
Lange explains, "The key to choosing real imagery revolves around some pretty simple concepts: lighting and color schemes that feel natural, as well as realistic scenarios that you can imagine in your own world. Finally, try to avoid plain white backgrounds."
Pay extra attention to all facial expressions within the photo. Our brains are sensitive to reading muscle cues, but some are more emotionally perceptive than others.
Before purchasing an image, I find it helpful to have a colleague review my selection to make sure my image is capturing the right tone.
3. Select stock with a story
As content marketers already know, stories are captivating. Great images have their own story to tell.
"I look for imagery that feels authentic and conveys a story to the viewer. I like accessible photos that give me the sense that I could somehow be involved in the moment being presented," says Lange.
Stories aren't static, so look for a sense of movement. The image should give you a feeling that something is about to happen (anticipation), is happening (action), or just happened (reaction).
4. Look beyond the picture in your head
When I asked Lange about the most common frustration she heard from customers, she said most people get stressed out when they can't find an image to match what they've visualized in their head.
She offers this strategy to guide you: "My best practice is to start with one keyword that is relevant, and then throughout the search change to other keywords that are similar – circle your prey, so to speak. Try to be deliberate in your research and cover a broad spectrum. I find that if I am too specific in my search, I end up missing out on a lot of potential images that would have conveyed my initial idea perfectly."
According to Lange, Shutterstock has created tools to solve this common challenge. "Our technology team recently built computer vision technology that powers a new suite of search tools based on pixel data, rather than meta data," she explains. "The technology looks at the composition of an image you like and will offer visually similar images. Using reverse image search, customers can also upload an image they like to find similar images they can license for their business."
5. Unravel abstract ideas
One of the hardest types of image to find are those that need to represent abstract ideas or conceptual B2B industry terms.
Lange knows the struggle is real. "I go through this process on a regular basis when I curate the monthly slideshows for partners, which are themed around abstract concepts like 'empathy' or 'action.' On our website we have a great feature called Shutterstock Instant, and it's essentially a visual thesaurus."
She explains, "When you enter a search term it will pull up all of the relevant imagery, but then off to the side there is a list of suggested keywords that are synonyms of the original concept. Abstraction can be so difficult to pin down that I find it helpful to have fresh ideas at my fingertips that can help keep me moving while I brainstorm."
To get the brainstorm going, do a Google image search of the term you want to represent to see how others have attempted to solve this visual problem. You'll get a sense of what works and what has become cliché.
6. Keep format flexibility in mind
No matter your immediate use, you will likely need your selected image to look good on multiple social platforms, and that means multiple formats and monitor sizes. Facebook and Twitter are optimized for landscape dimensions, while tall portrait formats perform better on Pinterest.
Lange suggests, "Keep it clean and simple so that it can be easily cropped or you can easily add text to it. Anything that's too cluttered or noisy will lose its impact, especially on mobile platforms."
If you're not sure how well the image will crop to varying layouts, download the free watermarked sample and take it for a test drive.
7. Invest time ahead of time
Finding the very best images available can take some time. Lange suggests starting your search before you're looking for a specific solution. "When you have the time to meander, you can feel more open about potential imagery for future projects," she explains. "Create a lightbox with photos and vectors that you find interesting and revisit it when you are searching for inspiration."
Lange also suggests taking idea inspiration from outside sources, "The world is so saturated with imagery right now that it's easy to look around for inspiration when you're feeling static. Museums, book covers, even other brands that you admire. Explore what it is that makes you feel connected to these places or things – how do they convey their message? There can be a fear that abstraction will miss the point, but the human mind is very adept at connecting the dots. Don't underestimate your audience."
As our guide Press Releases That Stand Out in the Digital Age shows, incorporating even simple multimedia components into your content will make a dramatic difference in terms of effectiveness.
The key is knowing which visuals to include to reach your particular audience.
To make it easier, PR Newswire has partnered with Shutterstock to provide customers access to its library of high-quality, licensed photos.
Read the multimedia news release or watch Shutterstock’s video below to learn how this new image recommendation and distribution tool will help boost your press release’s engagement.
Author Jamie Heckler is the Senior Creative Manager at PR Newswire. Follow her on Twitter @jamieheckle for more #design, #PR & #marketing updates.
Robyn Lange joined Shutterstock as an in-house Curator, highlighting the best of the 80 million images in the collection. She developed an extensive knowledge of image libraries through 20 years spent as a photo editor. Working for publications such as Time, Vogue, and, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, she has worked closely with some of the most talented photographers in the industry and produced elaborate photo shoots across the world.
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