Why 2024 Should Be the Year of Crisis Preparedness for Your Brand

Erik Bernstein crisis management

If you lost a major operations center overnight, if you were served papers for an unexpected lawsuit, if one of your execs went ballistic on social media right now, would you have a structure and a plan to support your brand through difficult times? If the answer’s no, then getting properly prepared to address crises should be at the top of your list of resolutions for 2024.

Do Your Crisis Management Firefighters Practice Their Skills?

Erik Bernstein crisis preparedness

Planning is important, but plans require practice to be used properly in a crisis Imagine you came upon a firefighting team just arrived at the scene of a fire, all milling around with leaders shouting conflicting orders, firefighters not recalling how to properly set up and use their equipment, and …

Know These Leadership Diseases So You Can Avoid Them

Erik Bernstein crisis leadership

  [Editor’s note: The author of this post, Paul Biddle MBE, has 23 years in UK Law Enforcement along with multiple tours of Iraq & Afghanistan. In other words, he knows some things about real world crisis management and crisis leadership. Today he explores issues, or as he calls them diseases, …

Avoiding the Somebody Else’s Problem Field

Erik Bernstein crisis management

Avoiding the Somebody Else’s Problem Field Don’t make this common, and often damaging, crisis management mistake! In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, author Douglas Adams famously described the “Somebody Else’s Problem” (SEP) cloaking device as the perfect way to hide even the most noticeable of items, writing, “An SEP …

Keeping Your Eye on the Ball during a Crisis

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Crisis management mistakes can cost you. In this guest post Tim Scerba, multinational reputation and crisis management expert, explains a deceptively simple problem that impacts crisis teams around the world. There is a lot going on during a crisis training. The Crisis Management Team (CMT) is sifting through real-time information …

So You Don’t Think You Need Crisis Training, Huh?

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I haven’t learned to do anything really well without training and lots of practice.  I suspect this is true for you in your personal and professional lives. We all have areas in which we’re naturally more skilled, of course, but without mentors, teachers who have gone down the trail before …

Why Everyone Who Touches Your Social Media Accounts Must be Crisis Trained

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When the need to respond to complaints clashes with a lack of training dangerous sparks can fly Dealing with online reputation is a regular part of doing business today, so much so that many overlook how disconcertingly easy it is for even an employee who means well to bring you into …

Crisis Management Quotables…on Learning from Others

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Take notes from others before it’s your turn to go on stage The playwright Terence, also known as Publius Terentius Afer, was brought to Rome as a slave, educated, and later freed because of his writing ability. So impressive were his abilities with the written word that, although many of …

Crisis Management: Fix it…but don’t Forget

Erik Bernstein crisis avoidance strategy, crisis communications, crisis management, crisis preparation, Crisis Prevention, crisis public relations, Crisis Response, Erik Bernstein, Jonathan Bernstein, reputation management Leave a Comment

Fix it and forget it is great when it comes to cooking, not so much for crisis management. Many organizations, once clear of a crisis situation, simply move on with business as usual. While we understand the urgent need to do the things that bring in money on a daily …

Practice for Crisis Preparedness

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Perfect crisis management takes practice, practice, practice Practice makes perfect. We’ve heard it from parents, teachers and coaches all of our lives, so why do so many organizations neglect the fact that they need to practice their crisis management plans in order to effectively put them into practice for the …

Crisis Simulations for the Win

Erik Bernstein crisis communications, crisis management, crisis preparation, Crisis Prevention, crisis public relations, Crisis Response, crisis simulation, crisis training, disaster preparedness, Erik Bernstein, Jonathan Bernstein, public relations Leave a Comment

As in other pursuits, you have to train to be good at crisis management Would you step on stage to perform a play without ever going through rehearsals? Do you think you’d be successful at the free-throw line if you skipped every practice? The answer, obviously, is no, yet organizations …

Mass Shootings – Think Prevention as well as Response

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Editor’s note: The following guest post from crisis management expert Rick Amme was written several months before Newtown. In his own words, “Unpleasant as this is, it is something you have to think about in a position of leadership: prevention, not just response, when it comes to shootings in the …

British Red Cross Disaster Response Challenge

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A hands-on crisis management experience Have you ever wondered whether you could handle the intense crises encountered by real Red Cross disaster response teams? Maybe you’re trained in crisis management, but want to get some real, “down in the trenches” experience. The British Red Cross Disaster Response Challenge is a …