I've been in crisis communications for eleven years. Started as an intern at a local PR firm in 2013, and now I lead a team of seven.
When I first entered the industry, I thought this job was just about writing press releases, liaising with journalists, and arranging interviews. Three months later, I experienced my first real crisis and realized how naive I had been.
The First Time
In the spring of 2014, our client was a chain restaurant brand. A consumer posted a photo on Weibo showing a rat on the floor of a back kitchen. The photo was blurry, and the poster said it was taken at a location in Chaoyang District, Beijing.
It was Friday evening, and I was about to leave work. My supervisor called and told me to come back to the office immediately.
We pulled an all-nighter. People from the client side arrived too—marketing, operations, legal. Over a dozen people sat in the conference room, discussing whether to issue a statement, how to word it, and whether to close stores for self-inspection.
The final decision was to not release anything that night. The next morning, the brand's official Weibo account posted a statement saying they had begun a comprehensive inspection of all locations, and the implicated store had temporarily suspended operations.
This decision turned out to be the right one. By Saturday noon, someone had extracted the EXIF data from the photo and discovered it had been taken two years earlier. The account that posted it was newly registered with only that one post. The situation quickly died down.
But that weekend I learned something: when a crisis hits, the hardest part isn't deciding what to do—it's resisting the urge to do something.
About Speed
There's a saying in this industry called the "Golden Four Hours." It means that within four hours of a crisis occurring, the brand must respond in some way.
I don't entirely agree.
In 2019, we took on a case. The client was an internet company that had been accused by a former employee on Maimai of enforcing 996 overtime and withholding wages. The post hit trending within two hours.
The client's CEO was anxious and wanted to immediately release a statement refuting the claims. We stopped him.
We spent six hours verifying the facts. The HR department pulled up the employee's attendance records, pay stubs, and exit interview records. We found that three points in the post were clearly false, but one was true—that department had indeed gone through a period of intense overtime.
The statement we ultimately released acknowledged the overtime issue and announced corrective measures, while also using facts to address the false accusations. No arguments, no mudslinging. Public reaction was much better than expected.
Six hours. Beyond the so-called golden four hours. But the outcome was right.
Journalist Relations
I have about three hundred journalists' contact information stored in my phone. Maybe seventy or eighty are active contacts.
Many people think PR work is all about wining and dining journalists, giving gifts, begging them to publish or delete articles. Does that happen? Yes. But that's not what we do.
My relationships with journalists are built on a different foundation: I give them truthful information.
Once in 2017, our client had a product quality issue. I called several journalists who had covered this beat and told them the actual situation, including the cause of the problem, the scope of impact, and the measures already taken. I didn't ask anyone not to report on it.
The coverage that came out later included criticism, but also objectively presented the brand's response. Compared to cases where companies try to suppress information and then get exposed, this was already the best possible outcome.
Journalists aren't stupid. If you deceive them once, don't expect any future cooperation.
The Team
My current team has seven people. Three handle media relations, two do content, one monitors public sentiment, and one handles administration and project coordination.
When hiring, I look for three things:
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Writing Skills This doesn't need explanation. This job requires writing every day—press releases, statements, Q&As, internal briefings. If you can't write well, you basically can't do the job.
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Quick Reflexes This means being able to quickly sort out the ins and outs of a situation and the interests of all parties involved when something unexpected happens. Some people are born with this ability; others never learn it.
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Emotional Stability This is the most important. When a crisis hits, clients panic, media pressures, bosses push. If you lose your composure first, the whole situation spirals out of control.
There's a woman on our team who joined in 2020. The first time she led a project independently, she encountered a very tricky situation—a client executive was publicly accused of personal life issues. She handled it for three days, slept at the office two nights, getting only three or four hours of sleep each day. Throughout it all, she never broke down, never cried, never complained.
Later I asked her how she managed it. She said she had volunteered at a hospital emergency room during college and had seen worse.
About Failure
Not every case can be handled well.
In 2021, we lost a client. The reason was my misjudgment.
It was a new consumer brand. The founder had made some controversial remarks during an interview. At the time, I recommended a cooling-off approach—no apology, no explanation, wait for the heat to pass.
The heat didn't pass. The situation escalated for a week, and the brand's reputation was severely damaged. The client later switched to another PR firm, issued an apology statement, and undertook a series of recovery actions.
When I later reviewed this case, I realized I had underestimated the sensitivity of that topic. Three years earlier, a cooling-off approach might have worked. But the public opinion environment in 2021 was different.
This lesson cost me a client with an annual contract worth 1.2 million yuan. It also made me more cautious in my judgment on every case that followed.
Now
In 2024, this industry has changed a lot. Short video platforms have become the main battleground for public opinion. Crises used to ferment on Weibo; now it might be a Douyin video, a Xiaohongshu post, or a Bilibili fan edit. The difficulty of monitoring and responding has increased significantly compared to before.
The cases we take on now involve more and more preventive work. Helping clients conduct public sentiment risk assessments, executive media training, and crisis contingency planning. By the time you're actually putting out fires, it's already too late.
Eleven years now. I still get woken up by phone calls in the middle of the night because of client emergencies. I still sleep poorly for days on end during major crises.
But I'm still doing this.