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 generated, true to the...

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 coming. It...

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 debating whether...