The unexpected has happened. It endangers your business. It may threaten life and property. Not hard for the Chief Communications Officer to conclude: crisis conditions.

You're cool. You're already in the headquarters suite. You're accessible and you have outreach. You know your first need: prepare to brief the boss. To get ready, you need to know exactly what’s happened. Your next need will be to shape what you, what the company can say — and to whom — and when.

Your crisis communications manual is there on the shelf, red-bound, right where you insisted it should be when your team finished it a year ago.

You see your team manager heading for your open door.

You reach for the red-bound book, flip the Contact Tree tab.

Your mobile is ringing.

You scan the screen. Texts and Tweets. Dozens of them…you put down the manual and begin reading...short bursts...you turn to the PC, go to Twitter.com. "I know," your staff guy answers your inquiring look. "It's everywhere."

Welcome to the world of Twitter, where everything you’ve relied on in corporate communications has been given racing wheels.

In the New York Times this week, a business page story chronicled "America’s first Twitter Christmas."

Frenzied shoppers were making decisions, tweeting each other and store employees, on where to park, what the bargains were and how to fix something they had just bought.

Retailers, said the Times, increasingly see the short, to-the-point public messaging as a business tool and have scrambled to come up with Twitter-centric communication plans.

Is your crisis communication plan Twitter-inclusive? Do you have a tech-savvy staff ready to break into the inevitable social conversation that will impact your stakeholders' perceptions—and their trust?

How will you manage your first Twitter crisis?

Students in the crisis communications class that Judith Muhlberg and I teach at Georgetown University are looking for ways to get ahead of the curve—by looking backward.

They're replaying old scenarios—Three Mile Island, Tylenol, Exxon Valdez, the MTBE episode in Milwaukee—repositioning them in Twitter world.

What if Twitter.com had been on a hundred thousand laptops when the water reactor leaked at the Pennsylvania nuclear plant 30 years ago? What if, just as a nervous consumer transferred a bottle of Tylenol capsules from a pocket to a shelf, he or she looked into the lens of an iPhone camera? What if Valdez crew members began taking pictures, texting and calling friends, family and authorities when the ship hit the rock?

Our students have no trouble imagining "what if," as they tap away on their electronic hardware, glance at and surreptitiously return texts on their phones.

They know how it is. They easily concoct revised scenarios. Old crises peak faster, often hotter, engaging far more people (both important and not, from the stressed executives' perspective), and they take for granted that chief communications officers today are capable and already in the game.

And what of the media, mainstream and new wave?

The brisk rise of cyber news sources, on the retreating newspaper landscape, has changed the journalism game and everything CCOs' once took as sustainable in corporate public relations.

Just one reminder: On the same day that the Times ran its "Twitter All the Way" business story, there was an Associate Press piece in the Washington Post about an Opel auto launch. It was not a big story. What was (as yet) unusual about it was that the AP reporter got his source, quoting General Motors' top European executive, from the executive's blog on the GM website.

GM's corporate communicators know how it has to work. Effective participation in business news requires strategic e-sourcing.

Companies who can't and don't want to get off the world of social media, citizen journalism, and generalized, unauthorized, rambling and rampant social-friending conversation must get in there and mix it up, listen and learn, tell it straight, tell it now.

Richard Edelman put it very well in an interview he did with the McKinsey Quarterly this month. He says we need to consider the PR field as a continuous conversation front where CCOs need to break into Facebook and Twitter feeds to correct mistakes and to become a trustworthy conversationalist.

Take a new look at your company's crisis communications manual, now certainly an online version. What's the e-sourcing, e-conversation plan? When crisis hits, the CCO's traditional Contacts Tree has to light up a lot of hand-helds.

— E. Bruce Harrison
    Washington, DC
    December 4, 2009