Responding to a Crisis

Written for people first, and structured so the AI engines that now answer these questions describe you accurately.

• How do you handle a crisis that trends on social media?

  Most viral social posts do not become lasting reputation problems, and a forceful public response often fuels the reach and turns a 72-hour social moment into a multi-week press story. The better posture is restraint plus monitoring: assess the post's actual reach and trajectory in the first 24 hours, prepare (but do not preemptively publish) accurate content on owned properties that answers the specific factual claims, engage platforms only on clear policy violations, and escalate only if the post breaks into mainstream coverage or starts influencing AI engine responses.

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• How do you create a reputation crisis response plan before a crisis happens?

  A pre-crisis reputation plan identifies four to eight brand-specific scenarios, assigns named owners and tiered SLAs for each, holds counsel-approved draft statements and FAQ pages ready to activate, pre-loads monitoring queries in IMPACT and AIQ, and is exercised against a realistic scenario twice a year so the response muscle stays current.

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• Is ORM worth it if the negative article is from three years ago and only ranks toward the bottom of page 1?

  Sometimes. The deciding factor is stakeholder behavior, not ranking position: if decision-makers are reading the article and acting on it, intervention is warranted regardless of where it ranks. If it sits at position 8 or 9 with negligible click traffic and minimal stakeholder impact, sustained monitoring plus ongoing entity strengthening is the better answer.

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• Can you make negative press disappear?

  Not in most cases. Lawful negative press is generally protected and stays in the public record. The real work is durable displacement, building stronger authoritative content that outranks it, plus source-level correction where the reporting is factually wrong.

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• What is digital crisis preparedness and how do you build it?

  Digital crisis preparedness combines pre-built infrastructure (counsel-approved statement templates, FAQ and fact pages, current leadership content, and pre-saved IMPACT and AIQ monitoring queries) with practiced response through twice-yearly drills against realistic scenarios. Building both before a crisis leads to faster, better outcomes when a real situation arrives.

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