ADAC, VW, Germanwings – those are only three companies that recently made headlines with a crisis. Dietrich Schulze van Loon explains what crisis prevention can achieve and how effective crisis management works. He is managing partner at ORCA van Loon and has significant expertise of more than 35 years in the field of crisis communication.
Herr Schulze van Loon, how are companies prepared in the field of crisis prevention according to your experience?
Insufficiently. Many companies only engage with crises when it is already too late. They regard this topic as a waste of resources. In my opinion this is a great mistake.
What makes crisis prevention so relevant?
The better one is prepared for a crisis, the more efficient can one manage the situation. To carry out crisis prevention – for example to prepare manuals includingly social media guidelines, to perform media trainings or realistic crisis simulations – is quite relevant. We just received a very positive feedback from one of our clients confirming this fact, with whom we performed an intensive crisis training that lasted several days.
In five keywords: What is important for effective crisis management?
Monitoring, preparation, competence, instruments and speed.
Keyword speed: Thanks to social media we are able to trace events at the end of the world almost in real time. How has social media changed crisis prevention?
Social media has changed our communication environment fundamentally. A company can become a target on a variety of channels in no time - keyword shitstorm. Cross-media thinking is required in such a situation. Especially social media channels have to be observed permanently and the tonality of the web has to be understood as well.
Nowadays also own employees can be increasingly strong potential communicators. How do they have to be included in communication strategies?
To realize a one voice policy is becoming increasingly harder today. As a matter of fact, employees should absolutely be included in the topic of crisis communication. In case of a crisis this works best personally, while using technological dialog formats. This way the situation can be explained to them and three to five key messages can be passed on to help.
And Finally – what would be an example for good crisis management?
Well, as sad as it has been: Germanwings has acted in an exemplary manner during their crisis. Other companies struggle much more in such situations.
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