3 Types Of Online Crisis You Can Prevent By Being Proactive

The online environment has grown to play a major role in the business health of an organization. Being able to connect easily with one's customers and holds certain risks as well. The ease of access of the internet by all individuals across the world has made corporations potentially vulnerable towards negative content online. Any customer or disgruntled employee can use the internet to create negative reviews about a company. This may include backlash on social media sites and politically incorrect communication on a number of platforms. Even the lack of engaging content on the company's part on different portals can affect the company's success.

There a number of online crisis' that a company can be severely affected by. Hence crisis communication should play a significant role for reputation managers to ensure the company remains successful. The three types of online crisis that a reputation manager should prepare for are:

Technical Crisis

This type of crisis basically means that the company's website is down due to a variety of reasons. Every reputation manager must take steps to ensure that the company's official website does not face problems or stop working at any point of time. This sort of technical failure can lead to severe problems and prevent customers from accessing the company website for their needs. This can lead to serious losses. A crisis communication strategy must be created to ensure that technical failures are dealt with immediately and keep the losses on the lower side.

Human And Social Crisis

This type of crisis is caused by people and can potentially lead to serious consequences for the brand. The ease of access to the internet means that the brand remains vulnerable towards negative attacks online. These can be caused by disgruntled ex employees, unhappy customers and even competitors. Bad reviews and negative comments can potentially affect the brand's corporate reputation. Here crisis communication must be used on a daily basis to find and address the negative content to prevent them from affecting the brand.

Public Relations Crisis

This type of crisis has the potential to not only seriously affect the brand's online reputation, but also strain relations with external stakeholders. Negative publicity is extremely difficult to combat. It can affect the brand's relation with their customers which in turn leads major losses. It is easier to prevent negative publicity rather than try to combat it once it has been published.

Even with a set corporate reputation strategy to improve the brand's reputation online, there are a number of risks and potential crisis which can arise. A brand must prepare for these risks and have their own crisis communication strategy to prevent the brand from being unsuccessful. 

Source : articlesbase.com