135: The 10 Crisis Types Communicators Need to Know How to Handle

How does one know if a situation with a brand or business is in a real crisis or merely a bump in the road?

Now Bill and Melinda Gates high profile divorce has taken another turn with new reports the tech giant had an affair with a Microsoft employee.

Yes, it's the latest scandal to come.

To light following news of weekend retreats.

With an ex girlfriend and a connection to Jeffrey Epstein.

Chrissy Teigen now getting a taste of the less cancel cult.

Multiple retailers distancing themselves from the former.

Model and pulling a cookware line after several startling accusations of cyberbullying from the past resurfaced. Colonial Pipeline paying a ransom to the criminal hackers who shut down their systems last week. Now this source, familiar with the situation, not telling me how much Colonial Pipeline paid or when that payment specifically was made.

Well, after moving to the United States last year, Prince Harry uses his freedom of speech to bash freedom of speech and the First Amendment. Welcome to the Confident Communications podcast where we help communicators create the right response at the right time and deliver it in the right place. On the podcast this week, what constitutes a crisis for business owners and communicators? It's not often that you think about what a crisis might do to your business. I do because that's my job. But it is important to be prepared when it, when it happens, because there's always a crisis around the corner. The first step in crisis planning is always to determine the different types of crisis, the types that can hurt your business. Now, different crises will necessitate different resources, different stakeholders. But the problem is, how do you plan for something if you don't even know what's going to happen or what is happening in the first place? Now, when I work with clients on crisis planning, I run them through an exercise. I run them through a threat list. I ask them what they perceive to be potential threats to their business. The answers I often receive in this exercise are the logical threats, the obvious types of threats. Rarely do I get the threats. They're on the list I'm going to give you today. But these other threats, the not so obvious ones, can hurt your business just the same. A good crisis plan is based on an understanding that there could be a myriad of crises that can impact your organization. So it's imperative that you know how to respond to any crisis in advance. So in this episode, I'm going to cover 10 common types of crises that a brand or business may face. Now you if you're a business owner or a communicator, you work for business. I know you can add plenty more of crises examples to this list, but these examples will give you a starting point to uncovering the potential vulnerabilities in your business. Because when you know what you're up against, it can give you the confidence that you need to handle anything. Now, before I jump into the list of 10, let me tell you what's not on the list. And this is a crisis that most people define as a crisis. One type of a crisis is an operational crisis. So that's going to be the 10 types that I'm going to explain. But the first type of crisis that happens to a lot of businesses doesn't really fall into that list. And that is a disaster, some type of a disaster, a natural disaster. It's a crisis that is 100% out of your control. That's why it doesn't fit the definition of a crisis to your business. So these are the natural disasters like wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, explosions, terrorism, a virus. So it's any event where your business has zero responsibility. Now let's go on to the 10 types of operational crises that can impact your business. Okay, so number one, the number one type of crisis, the collateral crisis. Now a collateral crisis is when your business vulnerabilities are exposed due to a crisis, not of your doing. For example, natural disaster that I just mentioned. The natural disaster itself is not a crisis, but disaster reveals a vulnerability to your company. Something that shows that you were not prepared to handle that disaster. For example, the winter storm that plunged large parts of Texas into sub freezing temperatures and overwhelmed the state's electricity infrastructure. If you remember, it caused massive power outages, not just in Texas, but also. Right. Rolling blackouts that impacted states. Even up on the Canadian border, nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses were without power and many were without water as well. Collateral fallout example would be a headline like the Electric Reliability Council of Texas officials spent 40 seconds on a winter storm preparedness plan at a Feb. 9 meeting. That's an example of a collateral damage due to this one natural disaster. Another example from the same storm, a senator hops on a plane to Mexico for a family sojourn when his constituents are stuck home without water, power or heat. That would be Senator Ted Cruz. We also talked about that in the episode. So when you have one disaster, a business or an organization can rise from that disaster and show operational resilience, but they can also be felled by it as well. All right, number two example would be rumor. That's when false or misleading information is uncovered by chance or leaked. On purpose to harm the brand or an organization. I had crowdsourced this question on Twitter last week and here were two examples that I received. The first example was from someone who shared back in 2015, WestJet Airlines out of Canada, there was a distress call that was tracked on Flightradar24.com so this website tracks all the airline signals. The website claimed that there was a jet WestJet that was transmitting a code for hijacking, which happens to be 7,500 now. In the tweet it said, it's not confirmed, it can just be a mistake. But Twitter was off and running. So there was a story that this WestJet airline was hijacked. Darren Hales, he's the one who replied to me on Twitter and he stated that he had just started at that job, that the crisis unfolded on a Saturday night. And they. And that was one of the first things he had to deal with. And he could not get a hold of anyone on the comms team. Oh my gosh, can you imagine? But he also added that they did take control of the narrative as soon as they realized what was happen, they put out a holding statement and it turned out to be that they flipped the story right away. And he also mentioned that the University of Washington did a study about the spread of rumor online and how the rumor had a huge drop off as soon as the airline accounts started tweeting the corrections. Okay, there was another example shared by Twitter user Stacy Long. She mentioned, ooh, the viral and totally false rumors about Tommy Hilfiger announcing he was racist on Oprah. So it affected his brand for decades and it literally never happened. And I barely remembered it. But I only remembered it as soon as she mentioned that at Sarah Morgan mentioned to me when the FDA needed a crisis line to assure people that Pop Rocks would not make your stomach explode. That's another rumor. And then the old standby. Warren Weeks, one of my favorite media trainers, I've had him on the podcast a few times. He and I both talk about the same rumor a lot. Of course, Ellen the rum rumor went out that she. That she was not so nice and it turned out to be true. And now her talk show is coming to an end. The third type of crisis, the data breach, when confidential or sensitive data is viewed, stolen or held for ransom by unauthorized groups or people. The ransomware attack targeting Colonial Pipeline just a few weeks ago, it forced the closure of the major US pipeline and it caused the price and demand of fuel to skyrocket in 2017. I'm sure you Remember Equifax, one of the largest credit bureaus? They had a data breach. Do you remember the. I had talked about the social media app parlor that was back in episode 108. I'll include the link in the show notes. But right after I did that podcast, a few weeks after that, all their data was scraped by a hacker because they were able to get into the Amazon Web Services and they could find out all the user information. Also, a lot of local data breaches, you know, I'm just mentioning, you know, the big ones. But at a municipality level, you know, small business level, there's phishing emails that happen all the time to hack into companies and in the public and private sector. All right, the next type of crisis, this is number four. That's the unexpected loss of leadership. So this is when an organization suddenly loses a key leader, like a CEO, to illness or if a CEO has to step down, like in the case of Bill Gates when he stepped down off the board. Now we know why. Another example, this one provided by Warren Weeks, again, he mentioned Steve Jobs when he died of pancreatic cancer. Of course, the head of Apple Computers, SA Morgan on Twitter mentioned Tony Hsieh. So he was the former chief executive of Zappos. He had stepped away from the job, but he had died in a fire in New London, Connecticut. So still the brand Zappos was attached to that death. Another example that I found online that was interesting, XTI Aircraft. So they were startup in Englewood, California and Colorado. They had developed an experimental jet and it was poised, this business was poised to take off. And the vice chairman, Jeff Pino, who's getting ready to launch the company, died in a plane crash eight days before it was set to launch. All right, the fifth type of crisis, this is the social media fail, or the faux pas that can end up on social media. So this is when a company or brand intentionally or unintendedly make a mistake in oops or a fail. So some examples would be on International Women's day this year, 2021, the Twitter account for Burger UK tweeted, Women belong in the kitchen. So the full context of the tweet was in a series of subsequent threaded tweets where they were explaining that there was a lack of female chefs in the restaurant business. However, the first tweet, Twitter was not amused. Twitter did not have the patience to go through the thread and it turned out to be a huge social media fail. Another example that you may remember, fast food from a number of years ago, this was in 2017. McDonald's had a tweet that said Black Friday and then it said need copy and link afterwards. Burger King, at the time, the US Burger King absolutely blasted McDonald's for that bad tweet that social media failed. Another example, in February 2017, the Department of Education, they tweeted a post celebrating web to boys. So it was a quote with his name. However, they misspelled his name. And then when they retweeted the apology, they misspelled the word apology. All right, and then there could be another example. It could be from racial tone. So in 2018, you may have remembered the retailer H and M, they got into hot water when they casted an African American boy to have him model a hoodie with a message on the sweatshirt that said coolest monkey in the jungle. They rightfully received a lot of backlash for that tweet. All right, next, the sixth type of a crisis. I'm going to combine two of these together. Human error accidents or product harm. And then of course technical error accidents, the human type of accidents. So those were the errors that resulted in potentially dangerous, you know, circumstances. There could be a fatality. An example might be when people are killed in Tesla accidents. It could be police shootings. Okay, what happened in Minneapolis? We're coming up on the year anniversary of George Floyd. Also the Minneapolis, the Brooklyn center police officer is going to be charged with manslaughter. And now they're looking at murder when she thought she was using a Taser and she ended up killing someone instead. So those would be human error accidents. Aligned with that would be adjacent to that would be technical air accidents. So think airplane crashes. Think the Challenger explosion. Think Samsung Galaxy when it exploded in people's pockets. So on a smaller scale, think about it at your company, what kind of accident could happen that could cause injury to a customer or to an employee? All right, next, the seventh type of crisis could be corporate culture crisis. This is a new and upcoming type of a crisis. Like 20 years ago you wouldn't necessarily have this type of crisis. But nowadays, definitely some people at companies may dismiss this as woke culture. You never want to get in the trap of think of ever using the word woke or ever tolerating the word woke in any of those conversations. When it comes to any type of crisis planning, crisis management, crisis mitigation, or day of when you are managing a crisis that is happening in real time, that's where companies have corporate culture problems. So examples might be Amazon's fight, the anti union fight that you're dealing with and even before all this during the pandemic. They received a lot of bad press for how they were treating employees during the pandemic. Same with Kroger. That's the nation's largest gr. They received a number of bad stories due to their treatment of employees during the pandemic. All right, next, the eighth type of a crisis would be stakeholder activism. Another rising type of crisis for this time. That's when an organization is confronted, usually online, by angry, disconnected or disenfranchised customer consumers or members or voters or town folks. You know, whatever the group, the organization, they're usually called out for behavior that's inappropriate or dishonest or people feel it's unjust behavior. Stakeholder activism. I'll be spending a lot more time on this topic in the very near future. All right, next, the ninth type of crisis. Think malevolence. Think malice. Think of when extreme or problematic behavior impacts the reputation of a brand or business. Think Kevin Spacey. He was removed from the film all the Money in the World after he was accused of sexual misconduct. I mean, basically he was wiped off, you know, the map. He was completely canceled for that. More recent Chrissy Teigen being dropped by Target, even though she says that she wasn't. That that plan was in advance. I don't believe that. Macy's and recently Bloomingdale's. I, I guess Bloomingdale's was getting ready to sign her. I read this this morning. They were getting ready to sign her and then this whole blowup happened about how she was sending extremely cruel messages to other women on social media. She was within hours of signing a deal with Bloomingdale's. Boop. It ended because of her malicious behavior. All right, next. This is the tenth type of crisis. I kept it for the last one because this one hurts, but sadly, it's a work violence. So unfortunately, nowadays, so much of this example comes from shootings. So think FedEx in Indiana. Think of there were employees in 2020 who were killed at the Molson Coors facility in Wisconsin. Also examples, just a few weeks ago in St. Cloud, Minnesota, there were five employees who were held hostage at a Wells Fargo bank. So any type of workplace violence that can happen, there are many more obviously on that list. But it's something that everyone should plan for because you never know. That is the list of 10. Now you know there are many more. If you were counting along with me, I'm sure you probably thought of many more on your own. Consider this just a sample plate, but it's a good list for you to Start from when you're planning for a crisis. Here is my call to you. If you're a leader of a business or if you're a communicator for a business, use this as an exercise. Create your top 10 list for the potential threats to your organization. Don't make them necessarily logical, the ones that you always know about. Go off of this list and see if your business can be impacted by any of them. Okay, there's number one, the collateral crisis. Number two, rumor. Number three, a data breach. Number four, unexpected loss of leadership. Do you have a secession plan in place? A fifth type, social media fail or the faux pas. Number six, human error accidents, technical air accidents. The seventh, corporate culture crisis. The eighth type of crisis, stakeholder activism. The ninth type of crisis, any type of malicious behavior. And finally, number 10, the 10th type of crisis, workplace violence. So make sure that if you are someone responsible for putting a communication plan together, a crisis plan together, make sure you make a plan to plan for a crisis because you don't want your next crisis to go viral. That's all for this week on the podcast. Remember, you can follow me on Twitter ol McPherson and now on Facebook @Molly McPherson, PR thanks for listening. Bye for now.