Data on the Motrin Mom Crisis

In Dr. V’s PR class we discussed the Motrin Mom crisis and how twitter and blogging escalated the crisis.   The following blog post analyzes data and provides graphs about the disscussion of the crisis on Diggs and Google.  Two pieces of advice that the post gives  that I found correlated with our principles of crisis communication are as follows:

• Apologies are cheap and can diffuse a crisis if caught soon enough

• People go to search engines when a crisis breaks out so monitor these sites as well as other online discussions

Data is a way to show that your PR efforts work and these graphs show that Motrin’s PR efforts diffused the discussion the crisis in a matter of a few hours.

Principles of Crisis Communication

1. DO NOT LIE!!!  This is the most important rule of crisis communication.  Public Relations’ first responsibility is to the publics and the people, therefore do not lie to them.  Also, lying usually backfires and causes more bad PR for the organization.
2. Apologize and rectify the problem.  If the crisis involves a particular individual of the organization, have that individual take responsibility.  Do not put blame on the organization if the blame is on the  individual.
3. Communicate clearly, quickly and choose your words very carefully.  That is why PR exists, to communicate to the publics.  Some words are very emotionally loaded and therefore, you need to choose words carefully.
4. Don’t blow something out of proportion.  If something is an isolated incident, keep it isolated.  But dont underplay a crisis.
5. Try to solve the crisis at first sign.  Don’t let something escalate; be alert and monitor the crisis.
6. SOLVE THE PROBLEM!!

PR practitioners need to ask themselevs what is best in the long-run.  This is the difference between long-term PR and “one night stand PR” (according to Dr. V.). One Night stand PR is giving PR in general a bad name and reputation.  A crisis needs to be dealt with carefully and the strategies need to be analyzed in the long run.