I know many China managers who constantly run flat-out and routinely over-schedule themselves. These are the same people who don’t have time to adequately train their staff or meet their own consultants and outsourcers. They feel pressured to roll-out new products and like forging cross-branding or promotional strategies with other companies. How will these people pick up on early warning signs of PR problems? How will they handle those first crucial hours of a media melt-down?

China is potential PR nightmare for foreign-run companies. You don’t need to see the list of victims again. Your job as a key manager or owner of a business here in China is to have a plan for dealing with YOUR potential media nightmare. You may not know exactly where it is coming from – but it may very well involve your newest, lowest level, least trained front-line people.

EVERY orientation training program in China should include a communications policy and an emergency procedure for getting information up to the right people immediately.

1) If you are in the public eye, you already have a public image. Either develop a relationship with a PR pro or do the reading yourself. Have some idea how you are perceived in the market place. Know your own vulnerabilities. Have a sense of what image you want to project to the market. Some of the companies that do a great job branding their products have no sense of how to build their own corporate identity.

2) Have a plan. When an irate customer (or a reporter who has just spoken with an irate customer) calls your office, what’s the first message they will receive? Will your new receptionist tell them you are on vacation in Paris, or that they don’t know what’s going on? What is your plan for dealing with dissatisfied customers? You may have no idea what your PR crisis will look like, but there’s a really good chance it will start with an angry customer or a reporter confronting your front-line customer service people. Do they know what to do? Do you?

3) Have a message. There are still companies in China with no web presence, no blog, and nothing to say to the world. Do a web-search of your own company and your own management team. If you don’t have control over your own message, someone else will.

4) Solve your problem once. Be quick about it. Have a definitive answer and execute correctly. Get the right input. The latest MNC media event was made worse when company lawyers convinced management that angry customer should sign a liability waver before getting their refund. A PR or media crisis is as much a marketing problem as it is a legal one. Companies that seem adrift or bumbling in the first few days of a media event are the ones that attract the sharks. IT IS MUCH EASIER TO FIX YOUR PROBLEM IF YOU HAVE ALREADY DESIGNATED A CRISIS TEAM AND A COMMUNICATIONS POLICY IN ADVANCE.

5) Follow up. PR problems are more like earthquakes than lightening strikes. They may seem random the first time, but they tend to repeat along the same or connected fault lines. Companies that survive PR crises are the ones that are both reactive and proactive. Figure out a way to deal with the problem so that it doesn’t come back to haunt you again.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 7:03 am and is filed under Managing in China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.