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Texting, meet crisis communications

By: Christi Dixon | 01/24/2008

When the mayor of Detroit sent text messages more than five years ago, he might have been ahead of the social media curve. Now he's having to engage legal and crisis counselors to deal with the trail.

A few lessons we can learn from this:

- Don't text, email or type what you would fear coming out in larger media sources. There are lots of ways to trace electronic signals.

- Think about your tone and your means of communication. (For instance, crisis messages are best received if we see a real, live, warm person delivering the message.)

- Run some exercises with your own team on what emails, blog posts or soundbites might come back to haunt you. Hindsight is 20/20, so use past opportunities to brush up your crisis communications plan, participate in a crisis drill, or add electronic communications guidelines to your employee manuals.

- And, if you're in a public office, AMPLIFY all of the above.

Posted in Crisis Communications, Issues and Crisis Management