The pace of technology is reaching a fever pitch, with new innovations, upgrades, and features emerging all the time. As technology evolves in countless ways, it’s vital that your crisis management plan evolves as well. Today, we’ll take a closer look at the dangers of not keeping your plan up to speed with technology changes, which are happening all the time. Consider some of the ways that technology is rapidly evolving in our day-to-day lives:
Use of Social Media
Today, nearly 70 percent of American adults use social media, compared to just 5 percent in 2005. These platforms have significantly changed the way people interact with each other, businesses, elected officials, and organizations. Meanwhile, they’ve helped speed up the pace with which information—comments, articles, videos, and more—is shared.
New Digital Threats
As we increasingly rely on digital technology to conduct our personal and business affairs, data has emerged as one of the most lucrative items for thieves to steal. In fact, the global cost of cybercrime is expected to reach $2 trillion by 2019, a threefold increase from the 2015 total, as digital threats grow increasingly sophisticated and widespread.
Instantaneous Information
Online news, social media, and mobile technology work together to provide breaking information to people as it is happening, no matter where they are. So if your company has an embarrassing PR blunder or a costly product recall, you can bet that people will hear about it, worldwide, in very short order.
Technology and Your Crisis Management Plan
As technology evolves, it has the potential to expose your organization to a variety of threats, such as social media crises, ransomware scams, and bad press that spreads like wildfire. Digital technology has enabled crises to emerge and grow more rapidly, and you must be able to access and activate your crisis management plan quickly and confidently in order to keep pace.
Consider the consequences of a slow crisis response at your organization. Online outrage may grow over a negative news article or a damning Facebook Live video. Customers may get fed up waiting for information about a product recall. Or worse still, the personal information of clients and partners may be compromised by a rapidly growing data breach.
Today’s dynamic technology landscape requires crisis management that is fast and nimble. Every year, threats are becoming more sophisticated and numerous, which means your crisis plan should be a “living document” that is easy to access and activate, and it should also be reassessed and updated regularly to keep up with the times.
Relying on hard-copy crisis plans, stored in three-ring binders, no longer cuts it for most organizations. This approach doesn’t account for today’s threats and the rapidly evolving technologies that enable them.
During an emergency situation, your crisis management team, PR director, and other stakeholders would struggle to quickly access a hard-copy plan—especially if the crisis strikes during non-work hours or on the weekend. Meanwhile, traditional methods of crisis communication, such as email announcements and manual call trees, slow down activation of the plan among stakeholders.
A Smarter Approach
When a crisis strikes, technology will enable it to move quickly. Your organization must respond in kind in order to gain control of the situation.
Strategically deploying crisis management technology is the best way to stay abreast of today’s high-tech crises. By leveraging mobile technology, a crisis management app is a reliable way to ensure that your stakeholders have instantaneous, reliable access to all crisis plans—right on their smartphones.
A crisis management app provides fingertip access to crisis scenarios, draft statements, activation protocols, and more. The platform also offers a secure link to contact details for your crisis team, as well as alert notifications and progress reporting, which all help keep stakeholders in close contact with your crisis response team as a crisis unfolds. As a result, your team is able to activate its plan and respond to a crisis right away, even if it strikes at the worst possible time.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, there is no doubt that technology is evolving at a breakneck pace. And if your crisis management plan isn’t accounting for these important changes, your organization is going to struggle to respond to your next crisis in a timely and effective way.
Luckily, the evolution of technology also provides the tools for keeping up with breaking crises. To learn more about how a crisis management app can help your organization achieve a fast, effective crisis response, sign up for a free trial of RockDove Solutions’ In Case of Crisis mobile app.
