It’s Never a Priority Until It’s Too Late

Crisis has always been a gateway to valuing the corporate website

The companies at the top of the Corporate Digital Communications Index know how to use their biggest owned channel proactively when an emergency hits.

In normal times, it is easy to focus on other channels – earned media, paid and corporate social – but when no one has a good word to say about you, these outlets can start to look positively hostile.

Social media has a place, but you can’t rebuild a reputation on social alone

One company that we work with had over the years started to direct most of its corporate communications on social media. However, when it experienced one of the worst reputation disasters in its history, it had to immediately step back from social media and focus on the website.

The conventional crisis isn’t the only reason

We’ve seen three new factors emerge that make the corporate website the go-to channel in times of emergency:

• During Covid, for some of our client companies, which play a big role in the life of their customer and employees, the website effectively became a public service channel. People needed the information and messaging located there like never before. And although it’s not pleasant to think about, do any of us think that Covid is the last global crisis?
• In the midst of reputational crises, you can monitor visitor sentiment to your website and adjust narratives accordingly. The data from website visitors can be a valuable complement to other reputation data – these are people who are choosing to engage with you and what they think matters.
• You can use the corporate website to turn the views of critics around – we have seen the website turn around the views of roughly 10% of visitors who arrive with a negative opinion.

Is your corporate website crisis-ready?

Hopefully your company will never experience one of these existential reputational events, but it is worth investing now to make sure the corporate website is fit for purpose if you need to persuade the world of your side of the story.

Get in touch to explore how our benchmarking, visitor research and consultancy services can drive your crisis preparedness and crisis communications should the worst happen.