Crisis Insider

While fans, management and owners of the second-highest-rated syndicated game show knew Trebek’s time was short, his off-the-charts ability to live and work for months with pancreatic cancer might have provided a false sense of security. That’s one way to explain a series of fumbles and flip-flops, including one last week, to name Trebek’s permanent successor.

In this month’s issue, we explain Green Steel and Information Aversion.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Ken Fields, SVP and senior partner, Americas crisis lead, at FleishmanHillard, and Ben LaBolt, partner, Bully Pulpit Interactive, often ‘parachute’ into a crisis. We asked them what they like to see when they get there. In short, the answer was preparation. Companies with a crisis infrastructure, a set of plans and procedures and a well-practiced team will be several steps ahead when outside crisis pros arrive.

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.