7 essentials for crisis navigation

From ill-advised tweets to product recalls to massive data breaches, reputational disasters could lie just beyond the horizon. Keep these protocols in mind to weather the storm.

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Perhaps you are trying to figure out how to come up for air when you’ve got too many reporters calling you. Or maybe your latest Twitter faux pas is trending, and you can hear your CEO yelling from two floors up.

I enjoy envisioning how research presented at the IPRRC can be applied to everyday situations. Here are seven tips to help you through your next crisis:

1. Count your crisis comments to understand your opposition.

The conclusion of many of the presenters at IPRRC is that communications pros in the middle of a crisis are too inwardly focused. Rather than listening to those members of the public who might help them navigate out of the crisis, they are too busy worrying about which words to say.

Anna Kochigina of the University of Oklahoma (“Framing the Crisis in the Digital Environment“) recommends listening to your key stakeholders by reading and analyzing comments on social media. She used Tesla’s fire crisis to test her theory. It turns out that in today’s crisis environment there are essentially two groups of people:

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