Crisis Insider

This month’s reader question asks whether it’s ethical to pitch positive stories as a way to deflect attention when you suspect a crisis is about to hit your organization.

Each year, the Institute for Crisis Management (ICM) tracks crisis-related news stories, classifying them as “sudden” or “smoldering” and putting them into one of 16 categories for its annual report.

just when you thought cyber would recede from the news cycle after it dominated the June Summit between President Joe Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Russian hacking returned it to the headlines.

Does your company have a process to shift gears quickly on its web site when a crisis hits? If not, during a grave incident or crisis your site might continue doing business as usual, loaded with upbeat content and imagery.

When cybercrime hits, you realize quickly it’s very different from almost any other crisis. It requires a tailored and measured approach to communicating with stakeholders. In the event of a cyberattack: Are you ready to comply with regulatory requirements? Do you have back-up channels so you can communicate with stakeholders? Do you have a back-up list of employee and stakeholder contacts? Are you ready to respond publicly without inciting threat actors to wreak more havoc on the brand?

For this month’s Buzz Box, we look at names and numbers you should know.

While companies may feel enormous pressure to issue a major diversity announcement, tectonic shifts rarely work, according to the NAACP’s Aba Blankson. Instead, she says, acknowledge what the company has, or, more importantly, has not done on racial justice previously.

If you don’t have a crisis communication plan with designated strategies, roles, actions and follow-up, you will be hopelessly behind before the trouble starts. What follows are tips to serve as guides to best practices, and, depending on your level of acquaintance with crisis management, I hope they are helpful as new ideas, refreshers, jumping-off points, a checklist or a combination.

Societal improvement can be frustratingly slow. As a business leader and communication professional, I find it painful watching organizations repeatedly fail to learn from their mistakes.

In this month’s Buzz Box, we explain the Tinkerbell Effect and Green Hydrogen and their impact for crisis communicators.