Topic: Crisis Preparedness

Brand catastrophes—those memorable, monumental events that incur tens of millions to billions of dollars in combined costs and losses—have drawn most of the attention of risk and resiliency experts in the global business community. Until recently.

Whether your brand is at risk is not a question of “if”, but “when”. The corporate risk landscape has become a free-for-all where actors originate or accelerate their agendas online through digital chatter to manipulate consumer activism, socio-political divisiveness, social justice action and protests, market disruption and volatility, environmental crises, and the fallout of the global pandemic.

When the World Economic Forum (WEF) came out with their Global Risks Report 2021 earlier this year, it highlighted the need for a greater focus on improving risk readiness as a way for organizations to build resilience. In their view, many organizations’ approaches to risk mitigation looked “increasingly outdated,” adding that “in a world of accelerating challenges, static annual documents need to make room for continuous horizon-scanning for early indicators of change and associated timelines for action.”

Like two sides of the same coin, digital chatter is a vehicle for certain groups to intentionally or unintentionally harm a brand, and also a vital source of intelligence for communications leaders to stay ahead of issues and mitigate crises.

Don’t like the weather? In some places they’ll tell you to wait five minutes and it’ll change. The risk landscape isn’t all that different. It changes constantly and the rising frequency of unknown risks makes it difficult to predict when a storm will hit.

The blueprint for a modern-day Super Bowl winner is a quick-thinking, opportunistic offense and a dominant, adaptable defense. Brands planning their own scenario for social media activities during the Big Game would be wise to embrace the same scheme this year to overcome unprecedented uncertainty.

In any other year, you may have just completed the annual social media audit or are preparing to have one done to assess the effectiveness of efforts on your social channels and identify opportunities for improvement. But if we’ve learned anything from the past year, it’s that we still have to plan for a future where the visibility ahead is limited by a dense fog of uncertainty.

For 400 American companies, the new year is starting off with a welcome accolade: they have been named to the Newsweek 2021 list of America’s Most Responsible Companies.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or...will they?

For leadership teams and boards, 2020 will be remembered as a time when chief communication officers stepped up and shined in the midst of turmoil and uncertainty. As brand communicators responded to the ever changing COVID-19 landscape, seamlessly pivoting strategy became the norm.

Who could have anticipated 2020? Surely the implausible confluence of environmental, social, and governance, plus technology (ESG+T) risks exacerbated by a global pandemic could never have been foreseen.

Show of hands. Who had a crisis management plan in place for dealing with every risk event that had the potential to pummel your enterprise in 2020?