Any crisis communication plan that hasn’t been updated in at least the last 18 months if fundamentally useless. If you haven’t dusted off your plan lately, now’s the time.
The rapid evolution of citizen journalism and the collaborative Web has changed the way companies need to watch for looming crises, assess the reaction to crises, and respond. Citizen journalism, of course, is nothing particularly new, but the popularization of blogs and wikis-and the various developmental paths they have taken-have changed the dynamics of how a crisis unfolds. If you don’t think so, just ask the folks at Kryptonite, who experienced it firsthand when word spread through the blogosphere with unprecedented speed that their bicycle locks could be picked with a Bic pen.
Or ask Eason Jordan, who’s out of work at CNN because the cable news outlet didn’t respond fast enough to some questionable statements Jordan made to quell the outrage that surged from blog to blog in a matter of hours. Or ask Dan Rather. Or Jeff Gannon. Or
There are two factors at play when a story hits the blogosphere. The first is the number of people influenced by what the bloggers are writing. The second is the attention paid to the spreading story by the media, which is often compelled to pick up the story and mainstream it, which makes it visible to all those people who don’t read blogs.
Most crisis communication plans these days don’t include setting up keyword searches on services like PubSub. They don’t address how to build goodwill with influential bloggers who could make or break your efforts. They don’t talk about setting up your own blog in order to have an existing relationship with your audience, much as Bigha did in advance of the story breaking about their laser points being used to aim at aircraft.
Worse, I suspect most of the crisis experts employed by the big PR agencies aren’t up to speed on the impact of citizen journalism. Some probably haven’t heard of blogs. Among these, several probably don’t take them seriously, dismissing them as “personal journals” that don’t wield influence and aren’t worth attention.
Many of the fundamentals of crisis communication remain in tact, such as the prioritization of audiences, honesty, concern for victims, avoidance of speculation and selection of appropriate spokespersons. But the new dimension is significant enough that it will inform many key aspects of the plan. If “Now is Too Late” is the mantra of crisis communication in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, “Yesterday is Too Late” can replace it in the era of citizen journalism.
Don’t wait. Get at that crisis plan before a crisis finds you.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
