Ask any crisis management professional and they’ll tell you, the absolute best way to handle a crisis is to prepare for it before it ever happens. With digital media fast becoming the standard, it’s critical to factor the Web into both your crisis prevention and crisis response plans. In a recent blog post, social media and digital marketing expert John Bell gave an excellent example.
“We had a client crisis within the past couple of years that really called for a response video. Now the client wasn’t all that social Web-savvy. They had to learn fast. Still the 3 days it took to get everyone on-board with a video response from …. oh, that was another long discussion; that was 2 days too long. Planning for crisis response reveals these hurdles and gets executives and lawyers over them such that when a crisis hits you are not spending your energy convincing folks that your customers and those who influence them are all over YouTube or Facebook or Twitter.”
His story also includes four tips for getting reluctant C-suiters on board and giving your online crisis management plans a kick in the butt. With a new Internet scandal what seems like every other week, anyone caught unprepared is looking for trouble.
JB
Jonathan Bernstein
www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com