A blog is an invaluable tool when dealing with a public relations crisis. With a blog you can correct errors and quash rumors, advance your company message, and deliver the facts ahead of the news cycle. Through fair and timely treatment your blog will show that you are concerned and responsive, and allow you to influence the lens through which others view the crisis.

It is important to focus on transparency, information sharing, honesty, and accountability. These four elements are essential to maintaining trust and credibility, whether you are a multinational aerospace company or a local coffee shop looking to change the neighborhood landscape.

But you don’t have to take our word for it; look at how corporate blogs helped these companies:

Boeing

Boeing has routinely been praised for the quality of it’s corporate blog as an integrated element of it’s Public Relations efforts. This year Randy’s Journal is one of the finalists in the PR News, annual Digital PR Award (the winner to be announced in one week, on Wednesday, October 6).

The effectiveness of the Boeing blog can be seen in the uproar (or more accurately, the lack of uproar) over the delays in the first 787 test flight. Vice-president of Marketing, Randy Tinseth, was one of the first to announce the delay and the disappointment that everyone at Boeing felt at the postponement. However, he also used the opportunity to drive home that such delays are actually the sign of an accountable and responsible company that placed the safety of the end consumer over the short term gains of an overhasty launch.

Yelp!

Do you remember how 2009 began with everyone complaining about how Yelp! arbitrarily filtered reviews and used bullying tactics with small business owners? If so, you are one of the few.

In response to all the bad press, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman got on his blog and started providing additional transparency into Yelp!’s procedures, explained why he couldn’t share the full details of the site’s sorting algorithm, and made highly visible assurances that pressuring tactics were not in line with the website’s vision.

In the months since he and his staff have made it a point to regularly point out how the occasional negative review can actually be an opportunity or help a business’ performance on Yelp!

Actual Cafe

Oakland’s Actual Cafe was founded with the express purpose of creating a space where people could stay out late and interact with each other in an “actual” rather than “virtual” manner. After half a year of operation he was already encountering days when every seat in the establishment was filled with people, each on their own laptop. Since this ran counter to the vision Sal, the owner, had for the space, he began a social experiment: banning laptops over the weekends.

Rather unsurprisingly, this created something of an online kerfuffle with regulars who had been coming to think of the restaurant as just another wi-fi shack. For the two months that these complaints trickled in, Saul posted status reports on how the laptop free weekends were progressing, and re-iterating the philosophy that inspired them.

These days, Saul uses Facebook and Twitter more often than his blog at Blogspot, but because he has integrated his social media into his website, the effect is the same. Any lingering ill will is all but invisible amid the feedback from patrons and allies who respect what he is trying to do with the space, and how he has gone about doing it.