Crisis Management and The Half Second News Cycle
Digital media has changed the rules of crisis management, and companies that ignore the new rules are risking their hard-won reputations.
Before social media, companies had the relative luxury of managing crises in 24-hour news cycles. In most situations, news concerning business issues and crises would spike dramatically over the course of a day, peak over the next several weeks and then quickly dissipate. As a result, crisis management teams tended to think and act in 24-hour news cycles.
Today, business issues and corporate crises can - and do - escalate instantaneously, and the impact on companies and their reputations can last indefinitely. Why? Because we live in a world where hundreds of thousands of posts on blogs and micro-blogs like Twitter, within forums, social networks, newsgroups and wikis are created every second, sometimes to report on corporate issues and crises. We call this phenomenon the "half-second news cycle."
How can companies protect their reputations under these new dynamics? Having advised Fortune 100 companies on managing crisis situations that escalated on-line, we are well on our way to developing experience-based answers to this important question. To further validate our learnings, Cohn & Wolfe's Digital Media Practice studied - and met with - companies and communications professionals in the U.S. and Europe that have been in the trenches of crises (see Sidebar II: "Crises Worth Studying"). We compared the effectiveness of communications processes used before the advent of social media as well as since its arrival. By evaluating what worked and what did not, we identified a number of "best practices" that we believe are crucial for all companies to adopt in the half-second news cycle. This paper offers our insights.
