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If you find yourself having to fly by the seat of your pants and engage in a spot of crisis management, staying silent is the worst thing that you can do because other people will fill that silence with their own rather vocal opinions and you have zero control over how you are perceived, or more importantly the issue is perceived. Molehills become mountains and mountains become a shedload of volcanoes that erupt and cause damage to your company and it’s brand(s).
A couple of recent incidents (we’ll leave you to do the guess work) have epitomized this, and unfortunately, if issues are left to fester in silence, even if you do come along and say something, it may be too late, after all, people have had plenty of time to formulate their own opinions and depending on how much time has passed, no matter what you say, you’ll be perceived as using the time that’s passed to come up with spin.
Where you leave silence, someone else will come along and fill it.
You can’t crisis manage or even do barebones customer service if you are not prepared to get your hands dirty and be part of shaping the perception of your company and issue.
Just like when major companies cock up and deny the existence of a problem in mainstream press and ignore getting their hands dirty and either speaking directly with customers or at least putting out statements to where their customers are active online, people get annoyed and draw their own conclusions. Remember when Sony were accused of putting malware on their CDs and denied in mainstream press but were completely silent online where the real story was unfolding?
Management by silence is not a business strategy.
We’re human and particularly at a mum level where we recognise the attendant pressures of trying to run a business whilst trying to meet the needs of your family and attempting to be superwoman to everyone else, we also recognise that things can go wrong. We can be empathetic and we can give you an opportunity to have your say, but if you are silent, unfortunately we then get the impression that we are not only right to think the things that we do, but there has been something shady underfoot.
This is business and I personally know that there is an intrinsic trust that can happen between self-employed mums. We’ll take a punt on other mums and we’ll buy from each other and we’ll trust. It would be a crying shame if recent incidents leave a sour taste of distrust.
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