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

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.

Winging it without a crisis communications plan is risky but a lot of organizations do it anyway. We're all consumers of media. Have you seen the difference between an organization that's ready for a crisis and one that clearly isn't? It's not an accident. A lot of the times, we get called in after a crisis breaks. Something bad happens, someone Googles or ChatGPTs "crisis communications firm" and we pop up. We have experience with all sorts of situations, templates and

What happens when a business makes an unforced error on social media? They need to take their crisis PR response seriously.

I wrote this op-ed back in June, but Gov. Shapiro rebuilt I-95 too quickly and kept making the piece less relevant. There's been an...

Fitler Square Strategies is a crisis communications firm that works with colleges and universities.

Goals in a crisis communications plan need to be specific, measurable, actionable and time-limited.

Even though the campaigns in Pennsylvania have been at it for a year plus, the focus sharpens after Labor Day. Add in a few days or...