Prepared for an online crisis? Ask yourself these 10 questions

1. Do you have a very Internet and social media-savvy staff member or consultant on your crisis management team? If not, the rest of these questions are moot, your car is heading for a brick wall at high speed, and you aren’t wearing a seatbelt.

2. Are your spokespersons trained in the differences between online and offline communications?

3. How closely does your organization monitor the Internet for current or potential reputation threats?

4. How closely does your organization monitor the Internet for early reports of crises/disasters-in-progress, or of incidents that can become crises/disasters? Often Twitter is the first place such incidents are reported.

5. [If you’re publicly held] How closely does your organization monitor the Internet for potential reputational threats to your organization’s stock value? There is usually a lot of Twitter chatter about public stocks, and similar conversations via most forms of social media.