Corporate Crisis Management Blog

Brands exist in what some describe as the ‘Age of Doubt’.

Brand emergencies have increased in frequency.

Crises occur more often.

The escalation from troublesome issue to major threat evolves more quickly than ever.

There are an estimated 36 million negative posts about brands on the internet every single day.

While not every complaining tweet or accusatory Instagram post is a crisis, lurking in those millions of posts could be a fin in the water that will prove to the Great White that will eat your brand whole.

But how on earth do you track an emerging issue amidst so much noise?

If your organization doesn’t have a plan and the ability to get a tweet out in the 15 minutes after a crisis breaks, then you are not ready to operate in the new reality of the digital age.

Think that is too extreme?

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal we got a fascinating glimpse of the behind the scenes response at Southwest Airlines in the immediate aftermath of the terrifying and tragic incident on April 17th, 2018 when an engine failed causing the death of a female passenger and endangering the lives of the entire load of passengers and crew.

Aside from the well-organized specifics of the airline’s crisis plan and response, it was another valuable lesson into how the new rules of crisis management are applied when the worst really does happen.

The debate swings back and forth about whether Starbucks response to events in one of its Philadelphia stores in April is good, bad or indifferent crisis management.

However, it is inarguable that Starbucks did more than most would do - and the incident and its aftermath very effectively underline and illustrate the new rules of crisis management.

The facts of what happened on April 12 now seem established.

When was the last time you updated your crisis plan?

Go and take a look at it right now.

If the last revisions were dated more than two years ago, you are in trouble.

There is a high probability that your plan will not serve you well should you face a real crisis, in a world where digital media drives threats at lightning speed – and in which online and social media is the source of so many reputation and business crises.

You finally got around to building a new crisis preparedness plan.

One built for the digital age.

The plan is designed to enable a quick and effective response to emerging threats.

But how do you know it will work when the worst happens?

Waiting until your business and reputation are on the line in a dangerous situation is not the time to find out that your plan has weaknesses and omissions.

You get the call at 6pm on the Friday of a holiday weekend.

Your IT Manager has just discovered that the organization has suffered a major compromise of its data from an external party. It’s unclear how long it’s been going on or what information has been stolen.

Your job is to get the Crisis Management Team up and running and tackling the threat.

It’s been a wild and fascinating period recently in the world of crisis management. Let’s take a look at three highly visible crisis management case studies from the past year, looking in particular at what we can learn from them: