Public Relations and Corporate Communication II: Crisis Communication and Crisis Communication Management; the Ethics of Public Relations; International Public Relations; and the Communication Audit

Crisis communication management is the preparation and conduct of communication before, during and after a crisis. Preparation means a crisis plan, a trained crisis management team drawn from top management, legal, operations and communication, an agreed spokesperson, contact lists, pre-approved holding statements, a "dark site" (a web page prepared in advance and switched on in a crisis), and rehearsals. During a crisis the principles are summed up in the United States Centers for Disease Control's formula for crisis and emergency risk communication: be first, be right, be credible, and also express empathy, promote action and show respect. The first hour matters most, because silence is filled by rumour, and on social media that happens in minutes. Communicate first with those most affected, including employees and families, not only with the media; never say "no comment"; do not speculate; correct errors quickly; and follow up until the matter is resolved.

PR's ethical problem is built into its role: the practitioner is an advocate for a client and also claims to serve the public interest and the flow of truthful information. The profession's codes try to reconcile the two. The International Public Relations Association adopted the Code of Venice in 1961, on professional conduct, and the Code of Athens in 1965, drafted by Lucien Matrat, which grounds practitioners' duties in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and forbids subordinating truth to other requirements; IPRA consolidated its codes in a Code of Conduct in 2011. The Public Relations Society of America's Code of Ethics (2000) names six values: advocacy, honesty, expertise, independence, loyalty and fairness. The Public Relations Society of India has its own code based on the same principles.

• Front groups and astroturfing: campaigns disguised as independent or grassroots when they are funded by an interested party.
• Greenwashing: exaggerated or false environmental claims.
• Paid news and undisclosed payments to journalists or influencers.
• Spin that misleads by selective truth, and conflicts of interest from representing competing clients.
• Misuse of measurement: the Barcelona Principles (2010, updated 2015 and 2020) of the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication reject advertising value equivalency (AVE) as a measure of the value of communication.

International PR is the planned communication of an organisation or a government with publics in other countries. Its difficulty is difference: of language, culture, media systems, law and political conditions. Geert Hofstede's study of IBM employees (1980) gave the most used framework, with dimensions of power distance, individualism against collectivism, masculinity against femininity and uncertainty avoidance, later joined by long-term orientation and indulgence. Edward T. Hall's Beyond Culture (1976) distinguished high-context cultures, where meaning lies in relationships and setting, such as India, Japan and the Arab world, from low-context cultures, where meaning is stated explicitly, such as Germany and the United States; a press release that works in one may fail in the other.

Organisations choose between standardisation, one global message, and localisation, adapted messages, and usually combine them: a global strategy with local execution, the PR equivalent of glocalisation. For governments, international PR becomes public diplomacy, a term popularised by Edmund Gullion in 1965 for a government's communication with foreign publics rather than foreign governments. Joseph Nye's concept of soft power (1990) describes the ability to attract rather than coerce through culture, values and policies, and Simon Anholt's nation branding treats a country's reputation as something that can be measured and managed. India's cultural diplomacy, the International Day of Yoga (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2014) and its diaspora are frequently cited instruments.

A communication audit is a systematic assessment of an organisation's communication: its channels, messages, flows, climate and effectiveness, internal and external, measured against its objectives. It answers questions such as who communicates with whom, through which channels, how often, how accurately and with what effect; which messages reach which publics; and where there are gaps, overloads, distortions or bottlenecks. It is to communication what a financial audit is to accounts, and it is usually done by outside consultants or a team independent of the communication department.

An audit runs through planning (scope, objectives and team), data collection by several methods so that each checks the others, analysis, a report with recommendations, and follow-up to see whether changes worked. A common external measure is share of voice, a brand's or organisation's mentions as a percentage of all mentions in its category: an organisation with 300 of 1,200 media mentions in its sector has a 25 per cent share of voice. Following the Barcelona Principles, a good audit reports outcomes, what changed in understanding, opinion or behaviour, rather than only outputs such as the number of releases issued.