How Do You Handle a PR Crisis Communications Event?

Sometimes, another organizations PR missteps, are an opportunity to learn how not to handle a PR crisis. Just ask the Chicago Bears, who historically have mishandled every PR crisis of the last 10 years, including the one the week of December 12. Yes that right, this one went on for a whole week, because they messed up right from the beginning.

Is your response to dive for under the desk? Do you send out poorly prepared underlings, to face reporters and the public? Does leadership, make proud pronouncements at the outset, that could come back to haunt you because at this point, you just don't know? Do you react as an arrogant organization with the, "How dare you question us response"? Do you think that it can never happen to you? Do you have a crisis communications plan in place?

Every healthcare organizations will face a PR crisis.

How you handle the communications, will determine the amount of brand damage, and length of time people remember. In this age of social media and the Internet, there is no, "We just need to wait 3 days to weather the storm", anymore.

Many times organizations respond with:
Lack of organizational understanding of the need to handle a situation as crisis communications;
Different, conflicting senior management messages;
Testy responses to questions;
Lack of preparation by speakers in understanding the seriousness of the communication;
Poor speaker body language;
No overriding organizational message;
Organizational arrogance;
Lost messaging opportunity ;
Appearance of blaming others;
The organization appearing not accountable;
The organization furthering to anger the media;
No response at all with the "it's just a three day story and will go away";
Sending out unprepared underlings to face the media;

Is it not true that any press is good press! Every day, someone somewhere faces a crisis communications issue which is handled poorly. Just look at the Chicago Bears for the past week. You need to learn from others and be prepared.

It's not hard, and should be part of your marketing strategy for 2012, as a separate communications plan. By following these planning guides, you can weather any storm, limit reputation, revenue and ultimately brand image damage.

Understand the nature of the situation;
Be transparent;
Be proactive in how you intend to address the situation;
Limit the amount of time senior leaders i.e. the CEO or president speak;
Make sure everyone has the same message and is on board;
Develop strong organizational messaging of care and concern;
Don’t scapegoat, blame others or give the appearance of blaming others;
Don’t tell people things will change when things are not changing;
Practice, practice, practice;
Bring in an outside PR firm for another viewpoint;
Understand that your reputation is built up over a long time and can be destroyed in a few short minutes;
Remember that it is not just a three day story;
Watch your body language;
Know your facts about past performance, reporters will be prepared;
Learn from others;
Each year engage in a day of media training for executives. Dealing with the media is a learned skill that the majority of executives do not have. It is not as easy as it looks.

Most importantly, engage the media all the time all year round. Why? Because, media relations is a year round activity. Not just when you have a problem. By establishing positive media relations with the good you do, you won't necessarily be cut any slack in a bad situation, but you will get the opportunity to tell your side. You won't if you don't have good media relations already in place.

Plan now for that crisis communications event, and you will better off as a prepared healthcare organization in 2012.

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Creating a Sustainable Healthcare Marketing Operation in a Consumer-Driven Market

Sustainability...Presence...Perception...Experience...

These are the four constants that direct-care healthcare providers need to understand and incorporate for success in their marketing operations and campaign efforts in a consumer-driven market. No longer nice to have, these four basic concepts are now business requirements.

Sustainability- The resources to effectively and continuously communicate brand and differentiate your offering across multiple channels.

Presence - By maintaining a continuous presence across multiple channels as in so many other consumer-directed industries, you build brand preference.

Perception- With a sustainable, continuous presence in the marketplace, sooner rather than latter, your key messages become the opinion of you by consumers and they become fact in their minds.

Experience- The actual customer experience matches the brand image, perceptions and opinions of customers that you created in the marketplace that had been communicated in an integrated multi-channel sustained effort.

Change and Survive

A consumer-directed market is much different than a provider-directed market which requires skills and abilities that may or may not exist in an organization. Key success factors for creating a high performance marketing operation that delivers revenue and market share in the new healthcare environment include:

A Vice President of Marketing senior management position that reports to the CEO and is involved in all decision making.

Marketing resources human, operational and capital budgets to support a multi-channel effort externally and internally.

Comprehensive strategic and measurably focused marketing plan that is integrated with the financial and operational plan of the organization.

Tactical execution plan and timetable that integrates all the campaigning to be done over the fiscal year.

Internal communication and training to educate the organization around marketing efforts, expectations and their role in the execution of the plan.

Creation of a comprehensive marketing dashboard which communicates activities and results on a monthly basis to all levels of the organization.

The above organizational marketing success factors are at a minimum what is needed to move direct- care healthcare providers from a cottage-industry approach to marketing to a comprehensive multimillion or billion dollar corporation approach to marketing, that in realty, most of you are.

As the healthcare providers continue to consolidate across all segments, marketing will assume an increasingly important role in the survival and revenue generating activities for the organization in a consumer dominated and directed healthcare marketplace.

And that requires a far different innovative sustainable presence that changes perceptions than the old way of doing things.

You can continue the conversation with me on:

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/krivich0707
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mkrivich

Michael Krivich is a senior healthcare marketing executive and internationally followed healthcare marketing blogger read daily in over 20 countries around the world. A Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives as well as a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association, he can be reached at michael@themichaeljgroup.com or 815-293-1471. Areas of expertise include: brand management; strategic marketing; sales and marketing integration; physician marketing; product launch; start-up launch and revenue growth; tactical market planning; customer experience management; rebuilding and revitalizing marketing operations; media relations; and service line revitalizations. Mike is Huthwaite SPIN selling trained and a Miller Heiman Strategic Selling alumni. healthcare marketing, brnd, hospitals, health systems

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Selling to Physicians Through Integrated Marketing and Sales

Physicians are the lifeblood of many a healthcare organization. As competition increases for their attention whether it be a hospital, specialty pharmacy, medical device manufacturer, or pharmaceutical company to name a few, cutting through the din of messages and relationships can be a daunting task.

For hospitals failure to build successful relationships and sales strategies mean that your docs could admit patients elsewhere. Note to hospitals: If you are not selling to docs, then you're missing a great opportunity to build volume by creating a more committed medical staff than if you just doing "relations or liaison" activities. You can sell legally and effectively if you know what you are doing.

For medical device manufacturers, failure to sell the doc mean a more difficult time selling your product into the venue where the physician practices medicine.

For specialty pharmacies, the physician sends his or her patients elsewhere.

So how do you cut through all of the chatter and have marketing and sales work together effectively?

No magic answers here.

No pixie dust either.

But here are 10 rules of thumb for moving forward:

1) Your sales people must be using a common sales strategy across the enterprise. I have seen too many organizations where everybody's left to their own methods resulting in incorrect messaging and using poorly designed home-grown materials which could have some significant legal repercussions for the organization. Your sales force activities are about relationship selling and acting as the liaison for the physician to your organization. If you don't have a method and training, chances are you will not be as effective as your competition.

2) Use a sales database system to collect information and the marketing department needs to have full access. If your just starting to look at one, marketing needs to be at that table. Don't assume that sales or IT knows what marketing needs. They don't. Systems breed accountability on all sides of the ledger.

3) Create an interdisciplinary marketing and sales advisory committee. Where most organizations fall down is the poor communication and working relationships between sales and marketing. You have to get past the "the feet on the street" don't deliver the brand messages and promise in the right way, and all that marketing is good for is creating stuff, because I need more stuff to leave behind attitudes.

4) Train your marketing department in the sale approach that your sales people are using. This way marketing begins to understand the opportunities and challenges faced, and how your sales staff is trained to overcome them. This means that all marketing materials should be created to be applicable and useful at some point in the sales cycle. It's all about shortening the sales cycle. Effective materials will assist in that goal.

5) Let your marketing people go out on sales calls and major presentations. They can be a new set of eyes and ears as well as providing them with new perspectives on how difficult the job is. Insights from other areas will make you a stronger organization.

6) Cut down on the number of slide you use for presentations. An 80 page slide deck is all about you and nothing about your potential customer. If you have to use more than 10 slides, you don't know what you are talking about and don't understand your audience. Talking head are boring.

7) Marketing departments need to see what sales people have created for use in their markets. Sales people are creative and resourceful. You may find some useful material to use and distribute across the entire organizations.

8) Have marketing attend you sales meetings and weekly funnel calls. It's about relationships and dialogue. Marketing should have a roll in explaining the organizational strategy, and what they are doing to generate meaningful leads for sales to follow-up on.

9) Joint marketing and sales goals and objectives should be established. Share in the pain and share in the gain.

10) Constantly evaluate and begin again.

Michael Krivich is Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives and a Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association and can be reached at michael@themichaeljgroup.com or 815-293-1471 for consulting services in strategic marketing, media relations and interim marketing executive leadership assignments. Huthwaite SPIN selling trained and a Miller Heiman Strategic Selling alumni, both highly respected and successful international sales training organizations , I can lead your organization though the challenge of integrating sales and marketing.

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