News spreads quickly over the internet.  Look at recent news relating to Applebee’ Restaurants, the International Coal Group in West Virginia, FEMA in New Orleans, and problems faced by Wal-Mart and Starbucks.  These are all examples of crisis situations which have all being handled differently and with different levels of success.

Online crisis management is a rapidly growing specialization that encompasses both public relations and search engine marketing skills with the aim of protecting online brands and reputations. 

With the development of search engines and the rapidly growing numbers of blogs and forums there has been an increased opportunity for the public to air their views – both the good and the bad.  These views can spread rapidly.  This can create a nightmare situation for corporate public relations.

And it is not just the public who are participating. It has been estimated that over 50% of adverse blog and forum entries relating to commercial brands and products are the work of competitors.

The role of crisis management is to react quickly and communicate effectively.  It is possible to handle these types of situations well and actually come out ahead.  However, in the majority of instances, this is not the end result and reputations are tarnished. 

The initial step of a crisis management strategy should be to develop an internet monitoring system to find out what is being written online about your company and brands.  This gives your organization an opportunity to react quickly as the crisis is developing. 

And crisis can come in many different forms ranging from product recalls and lawsuits to natural disasters.  But relatively few organizations have a specific crisis management strategy in place.  The ones that do such as airlines tend to be active in industries in which disasters are an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence.

The speed at which news travels and the development of real-time technologies means that every organization should have a crisis management plan in place.