A Digital Crisis is a Click Away

Email. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. YouTube.

What do they all have in common?

They each put you or your organization one click away from a head first dive into a digital crisis.

Take, for example, the news today about Facebook disabling rogue data-stealing, spamming apps meant to give a user access to your Facebook account and go to town. Imagine waking up in the morning, logging on to Facebook finding that you’ve told your entire office something not repeatable in the board room. Now imagine, if you’re a brand manager for a major corporation and your online identity (Twitter, Facebook, et al) has been hijacked and false messages about products and/or services are spreading faster than the swine flu virus.

Do you or your company have a contingency plan in place? If you don’t, you should.
News and information is disseminated today quicker than it ever was and it’s only going to get faster. Years of brand building can come to a screeching halt in a matter of minutes. With that said, marketing and PR professionals must be advising their clients or executives as to what plans are in place in the case that your website is hacked; Twitter account has been taken over; or, your Facebook application has been injected with a virus. Regardless, these are all reputation-damaging situations.

Take the time to plan ahead. Work with your technical teams to continuously change passwords. Work with your PR team to develop messaging in the chance that a crisis does explode. Know roughly what to say and how you are going to address the situation. Think of it as classic crisis planning, but pulled through a digital prism.

How are you or your organization prepared to thwart or respond to a digital crisis?