How to face a crisis responsibly and efficiently?

As a student to whom the crisis communication management is pretty new and unfamiliar, I am still at the stage of learning.

Stop a Crisis in its track shares with us tips and secrets to deal with crises and restore good faith in corporations. Now I cite the part of the article here and hope it can give you some useful information.
Let’s see how crisis experts and PR professionals effectively overcome crises:

1. Be prepared: Schedule regular crisis drills on a weekly or monthly basis. "Create crisis plans for numerous reactive scenarios in advance," recommends Kjersti Gunderson, senior account executive for Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, the agency partnering with Microsoft during the infamous "Zotob" crisis in which top newsrooms across the country were hit with a virus attacking Microsoft operating systems. The campaign won the Gold award in Crisis Communications at the 2006 Bulldog Awards for Media Excellence. She continues: "Then, drill on those crisis plans on a regular basis," Gunderson says. The bottom line: It's not enough to plan ahead and talk about what you might do during a crisis. As every athlete knows, you must practice, practice, practice to achieve the results you need during a crisis. Arrange weekly or monthly crisis drills with employees, including meetings with key executives and spokespeople to rehearse messages. It's not enough to have one crisis-training session and expect the best. Crisis preparation is an on-going task.

2. Conduct meticulous research to identify crisis "hot spots." Once a crisis occurs, the first step is research: "Prepare for every crisis campaign by talking extensively with the client, listening and asking a lot of questions," says Mary Beth Popp, director of brand public relations for Eric Mower and Associates, which was brought in to handle a crisis that occurred when Hutch-Tech High School in Buffalo, New York was forced to relocate students to Kensington, a school in a high-crime area. The campaign won Silver in Crisis Communications in the 2006 Bulldog Awards. "If research is available, do it," Popp continues. "In the Hutch Tech campaign, we had someone take notes of every single parent complaint. We had pages and pages of complaints—and we read through every one of them. We categorized each complaint to see where the hot spots were. This way, we knew about Kensington's reputation, and we had all of the other concerns right up front."

3. Eschew the "no comment" response—get your story out in front of the media and the public or risk rumors and mistrust. "You've got to get your story out there—especially in a time and place when your efforts may be under the microscope and you may be mistrusted," says Michael Fineman, president of Fineman PR, who managed a crisis for cork producer Sabaté in 2001 when the company's wine closure, Altec, was attacked for being the source of tainted, or "corked" wine. When the company launched a new product in 2004, Fineman suggested holding a wine tasting with top connoisseurs to regain credibility in the marketplace. The results were no less than brilliant. The campaign won silver in New Product Launch, Business at the 2006. "In this campaign, Sabaté needed to provide their point of view as their situation evolved," he continues. "And they agreed that the next product launch they did had to be based on some consistent communications—so we decided to hold blind tastings with sommeliers and wine makers to test the new closure." This allowed Sabaté to get its messages out in a time of crisis.

4. Commit to a long road of crisis recovery. "This is still an ongoing campaign—going on four-and-a-half years now," Fineman continues. "To a certain point this speaks to the lesson of PR being a long-term benefit. You can't just send your communications team out there for six weeks and see what happens. You have to ensure that your voice is heard long term. Sabaté's commitment to develop a breakthrough product and their demonstration of honesty, good faith and acknowledgement of their shortcomings resulted in a laudable response to mistrust and crisis. Other companies might have thought it was a lost cause, but this company wanted to demonstrate its commitment to its customers."