No crisis is static, especially when it primarily lives on social media. When we use Siege, our social media crisis training tool, to help clients prepare for how a crisis unfolds, we can create new challenges by injecting new events into the simulation. For example, what if you're a salad company training to prepare for a cyclospora outbreak? Siege allows you to inject a regulatory investigation - even a botched one - into the training. The events are AI-researched and gener

There is something different about watching your social media feed explode that you can't capture in a typical crisis training. The first time I experienced it was working for Governor Wolf. In 2015, Gov. Wolf announced that he would continue to accept Syrian refugees following a terrorist attack in Paris. Republicans in Pennsylvania and nationally made it a flashpoint issue, and almost immediately, the governor's social media feeds lit up. The comments, posts, and tags kept

Last week, I wrote about what organizations get wrong in the first 30 minutes of a crisis. Here's what they should do instead. 1. Activate Your Crisis PR Plan and Assess the Situation Is it a crisis or not? Hopefully, you've done the training and scenario planning to understand what is a crisis and what isn't. But the first thing you need to do is get your team together and decide whether to activate the crisis response plan. You can't afford to spend the first 30 minutes deb

Having a crisis communications plan is the first step, but it doesn't help if it's obsolete or gathering dust somewhere. Here are 4 signs your crisis communications plan is already outdated. 1. Your Crisis Communications Plan Doesn't Start With Social Media Your plan should start with social media. Earned media or traditional media can still drive a crisis, but if you don't center your crisis communications plan around social media, you're in trouble. Social media pours gasol

1. Nobody Can Find the Crisis Communications Plan They're rummaging through file cabinets, shared folders, and emails to find the crisis plan. If your organization has developed a crisis communications plan, it should include a clear process for where the plan is stored and how it's activated, including who receives it and when. 2. There Are 87 People on the Approval Chain There's usually a mix of butt covering and a sincere concern about getting the proper approvals, but too

Most crisis communications training happens on a whiteboard in a conference room. A facilitator steps up to the front of a room. They walk your team through a scenario. Someone reads a prepackaged statement out loud. It's a boring version of the old choose your own adventure books. You go back to your desks. And then a real crisis hits your organization and none of it feels like what you practiced. There's real pressure. Your social feed is moving faster than you can think.

Data centers are the most heavily debated topic in Pennsylvania and across the country right now. There are significant public relations and communications campaigns running in support of the projects. Locally, people are upset and they're showing up to local meetings and taking their frustrations to social media. Data centers are being treated as an existential threat, but what happens if it ends up being more like a typical land use issue? Read my latest column in Real Clea