Blogs provide a simple crisis communication solution
Dark sites, fully built web pages held offline until needed, are known as valuable crisis management tools because they grant you the ability to react almost immediately to negative incidents. Taking that a step further is the idea of basing your dark site on a blogging platform, which, as Phillipe Borremans describes in this quote from a Communication Magazine article, has several benefits:
While a “dark site” doesn’t necessarily need to be based on a blogging platform, it does hold a couple of very important advantages:
- A blog is content focused and can be managed by non-technical professionals – no need for the IT crew to update a webpage, the communicator can completely control the crisis site.
- Updates are written using a standard word processing interface with “what you see is what you get” features.
- A blogging platform makes the best use of RSS feeds in publishing mode, allowing for easy and automatic content syndication to other social media platforms like a Twitter channel or a Facebook page.
- A blog can contain text, but easily integrates video, audio, files or a combination of these.
After creating templates for potential crises, it takes only minutes to plug in the appropriate information and publish, creating an information distribution center. Also, many fully-featured blogs are also free to use, a major advantage for small organizations and a good selling point for winning over resistant execs.
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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]