In a crisis, silence is the enemy. Get a holding line out fast, tell your stakeholders the truth before the media does, and be seen to do the right thing.
I do like a good crisis and I wrote a chapter for the CIPR’s Social Media Handbook back in 2012.
We all love a good crisis but not when it’s landing on one of our clients at 11pm on a Friday, but as a thing to study. You learn more about a company from one bad week than from a year of its glossy annual reports.
So I was glad to get Ann Wright on the podcast. Ann spent a decade as a newspaper reporter and 15 years at the BBC, a lot of it in the consumer unit hunting down dodgy businesses for the Watchdog stable of programmes. She now runs Rough House Media and writes crisis plans for a living. When someone has caused crises from the journalist’s side and cleans them up from the brand’s side, you pay attention.
Does every business really need a crisis plan?
Yes, though the size of the plan should match the stakes. A one-branch cafe doesn’t need a 40-page document, but it does need to know who says what the moment something goes wrong.
A crisis isn’t only a BP or a P&O problem. Ann made the point that it can be hyper-local and still wreck you. Where she lives, the local paper prints a list of every restaurant with a one-star hygiene rating once a year. If that’s your pub, your trade can fall off a cliff by the weekend.
Think of it as an insurance policy. You hope you never have to open it, but the day you need it you will be very glad it exists. The more complex the organisation, the more planning it takes.
What should a crisis plan actually contain?
Three things above all: who is on your team and what each person does, who your stakeholders are and how you’ll reach them, and a clear-eyed list of the risks most likely to hurt you.
Ann starts every plan with people. Someone has to lead and somebody writes the holding statement and the Q&A. One person answers the phones and handles the media, another runs social, and somebody keeps watch on what’s being said online. In a small team, one person might wear several of those hats, but the roles still need naming before the bad day, not during it because it can be controlled chaos.
Here is what belongs in the plan:
- A named crisis team, with each person’s role agreed in advance
- Your senior decision-makers: CEO, head of comms, operations, finance and legal counsel
- A map of your stakeholders, starting with customers, and how often you will update them
- A risk audit that separates the likely-and-damaging from the merely possible
- Holding-statement and Q&A templates you can adapt in minutes
- Your social media logins, so a crisis doesn’t stall because the one person with the password is on a beach with no signal
I learned the stakeholder point the hard way. Earlier in 2024 our media monitoring supplier, Onclusive, was hit by a cyber attack and effectively went dark for a number of weeks. As an agency that reports coverage levels to clients, that cause me a fair few issues. What stung most was the communication from them. We would get a weekly email saying they were resolving the situation, full of detail about the US and Europe, when all I cared about was UK coverage for my UK clients. They were briefing the media as if it was all in hand while their actual customers sat in the dark waiting for the service to return. We felt they forgot who their most important stakeholders were.
How fast should you respond, and what do you say first?
Fast, and your first statement barely needs to say anything. “We know this has happened, we’re concerned, and we’re on it” is enough to fill the vacuum while you work out the detail.
Ann tells a story in her training about a hotel fire near Heathrow. Seventeen fire engines and a very serious blaze, around five in the evening. The company didn’t say a word until nine o’clock the following night. In that gap, customers were turning up to a hotel that was visibly on fire, having seen nothing from the brand. When the statement finally arrived, it managed to libel someone, too. A clear miss on both counts.
If you say nothing, people either think you’re hiding something or you’ve done something wrong.
That’s the whole argument for moving quickly. You are not trying to explain everything in the first hour. You are trying to show you know, you care, and you have got hold of it. People want to know – you got this.
How do you handle social media in a crisis?
Treat it as both a threat and a tool. It’s where a story spreads fastest, and it’s also how you publish your own version straight to a limitless audience without waiting for a journalist to do it for you.
The cautionary tale is HMV. When the retailer made around 60 staff redundant back in 2013, someone in the room had the keys to the official Twitter account and live-tweeted the whole thing. “We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired!” went out, followed by the now-legendary line about a director asking how on earth you shut down Twitter. It was around the world in minutes and it was very amusing to watch at the time.
Used well, though, social is how you talk directly to people. Ann told us about a music exam board that hit snow disruption and simply posted which exams were going ahead and which were cancelled, rather than ringing hundreds of teachers one at a time. There’s a practical tip buried in here that catches people out: put your social logins in the plan, because the worst time to discover you are locked out is mid-crisis. Worth remembering too that journalists now treat social as a newswire, trawling it for quotes and case studies, so the conversation about you is also their source material.
What does good crisis leadership actually look like?
Show up, tell the truth, and sound like a human being. The leaders who come out of it best own the problem early and show they actually care, then add a calm bit of perspective around the facts.
Fundamental to crisis communications is to do the right thing, and to be seen to be doing the right thing.
Ann’s favourite example is Nick Varney, the Merlin Entertainments boss after the Alton Towers Smiler crash in 2015, when a teenager sadly lost her leg. He fronted up from the start, including a famously aggressive Sky News interview with Kay Burley that drew more than 1,800 Ofcom complaints. Because he led from the front and showed real concern, Merlin’s reputation held even though the company had made serious mistakes.
Now look at the brands that got it wrong by choosing not to do the right thing. P&O Ferries sacked 800 staff by pre-recorded video message in 2022 – that didn’t look great. OVO Energy told hard-pressed customers to cuddle their pets and do star jumps to keep warm during the cost-of-living crisis. The difference with OVO is what came next: chief executive Stephen Fitzpatrick went on breakfast television the next morning, held his hands up, called it crass and apologised. That speed is what actually saved it.
For the moment you are actually in the chair, Ann teaches a simple frame she calls CAP: care, action, perspective. Show you are bothered, show you are doing something about it, then put it in context. Her pet hate is the hollow “our thoughts are with the victims”, which sounds like a line someone was handed to read. Your concern has to sound like it belongs to you – you need to be authethentic.
Listen to the full episode
You can watch the episode on YouTube, find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk, or reach Ann at roughhousemedia.co.uk.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my co-director Will Ockenden, where we get marketers and experts to talk honestly about what went wrong and what they learned from it. Ann Wright was our guide through the messy world of crisis, and she was very good company.
You can’t stop a crisis landing. A hack, a bomb scare outside the building, a member of staff arrested, a supplier going under overnight. Ann has seen the lot. What you can control is whether you fill the silence or let it fill itself. So if it kicked off tomorrow, would your team know who writes the first line?
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