The President of the United States just called out your company in a tweet.
It’s an experience shared by an increasing number of companies. Just ask Nordstrom, Toyota and Amazon, among many others.
Your world is rocking and everyone from customers to investors want to know what you are going to do.
Maybe you are lucky and you updated your crisis preparedness plan recently.
Maybe.
Or just as likely it was last revised some time ago. And it certainly did not anticipate anything like this.
Heck, even the crisis team members listed in the plan seem to have left the company.
And the ones that remain know nothing about their role on the crisis team or what they should do when the worst really does happen.
So now you are scrambling to pull together a team to develop a response. But there’s no template, no guidelines. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
And while you are discussing and debating what to say and what to do, investors are abandoning your stock, the media is rife with wild speculation and every stakeholder important to your future is looking to you for an answer.
We are in a new world of risk and we need a new form of response.
Take Social Media really, really seriously
The first and most obvious area to address is your social media capabilities.
Social media is now a serious business. Tweets from the leader of the free world dramatically underline the point, but it was happening anyway.
Those who wish to disrupt your business do so by gathering together in virtual communities and galvanizing direct action among thousands of like-minded people. Social media makes the playing field very level for the disgruntled with the large, well-resourced corporations whose business they wish to disrupt.
Think NGOs, dissatisfied customers, alienated communities and angry former employees.
Oddly, last year this approach was used by consumers to boycott companies that carry the products of the Trump Organization after a Californian digital brand strategist came up with the idea of #GrabMy Wallet.
At the same time, Trump supporters used technology to galvanize opposition for companies who they felt were critical of their candidate, companies which included Starbucks, Oreos, GrubHub and Netflix.
This would be a really good time to ensure you had deep, experienced and well resourced capabilities in listening, monitoring, responding and managing your interactions with key stakeholders via social media.
Technology that makes your response fast and agile
The other key area of technology in a crisis response plan is about how you access and activate your crisis plan.
So when that Presidential tweet bursts into the world at 4am on a holiday weekend, the old way has you scrambling to find where the latest version of the crisis plan is kept. And hope to goodness that your IT network allows off-site access to the company intranet.
Or you can reach for the one device you always have with you. Your smartphone.
With a few simple clicks, you alert everyone in the company who needs to know. You’ve shared the tweet and early online reaction. You have instantly accessed company resources and information that is needed to build a response.
And you’ve got the team together for a call in 15 minutes complete with dial-in numbers.
We’re biased. RockDove created the In Case of Crisis app that makes all this happen. And whole lot of other stuff you would need when that Tweet rocks your world.
In a world where technology creates the opportunity for unprecedented and unexpected disruption to your business, the least you could do is to ensure you have technology on your side in the response.
Find out more about the author by visiting www.thehatcliffegroup.com
