Does your website and social media pages have a Coronavirus COVID-19 advisory notice and what should it contain?

Examples of different Coronavirus notices around the world - and best practice for public communications

This is a strange start to the week after a strange weekend where we've seen the empty streets across Rome, Paris, and Madrid, then hearing about lockdowns extending to Los Angeles and New York and governments drastically reducing interest rates around the world.

Since many businesses will be considering their own communications, in this post, we're collating examples from different sectors, which we hope you will find useful. At the moment, the advisories seem to have been published, for the most part, by the largest companies, but we expect to see them across all companies in time.

Crisis communications teams in many of the larger brands most impacted by the Coronavirus are putting out Coronavirus business statements, like these who notified early on Monday 16th March:

• Starbucks
• Nike
• Tui
• Hubspot

Many smaller businesses will also be thinking about how they should communicate to their customers in these challenging times, including us, so to help you consider yours, this post shares some examples and common features of these statements.

At Smart Insights, we're fortunate in that we've been able to move our team to social distancing/working from home and there should be minimal disruption to customers and employees in terms of customer service, but we'll update further on this.

Best practices for notifications

From a practical, best practice, point of view, which we always like to cover, it's best if these are not only on the home or news pages, but across the run-of-the site on every page of the website, just below the masthead as with the Nike example.

As I write this, many of these statements have been put up in the US, but not elsewhere. As a minimum, they tend to cover:

• The impact on customers
• How employees are being protected through social distancing
• How customer service will be affected
• The location of changes to service
• A minimum time the action will be taken for

Others are now building lists of frequently asked questions

We hope this is useful, and we'll be following up with more practical guidance on updating your marketing communications plans and activities.

Notifications on other channels

It's also important to update Social media channels, since they are often used for customer service. This is particularly for companies with a physical presence. The latest advice is:

• Google MyBusiness - see COVID-19 advisory - enabling opening times to be changed
• Facebook - recommend pinning advisories to the top of your page - or changing opening times
• LinkedIn - also has a 'pin' option for company pages to use