Spotting fake news for crisis communications
Fake news is hard to spot. When it comes to crisis communications training what are the best free tools to use?
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Crisis? What crisis?
Crisis Communications Training
We deliver crisis training and support for organisations of all sizes
Crisis communications training and preparation is more important than ever before. It used to take days or weeks for brands to lose their reputations if they handled something badly. Now it’s more like hours.
By the time they bring in crisis management experts, it’s often much too late. The damage is done.
Many organisations have learned the hard way. Effective preparation in advance of speedy transparency is everything.
We’ve been training PR teams in how to write crisis communications plans for 20 years.
Ten years ago we set up some of the first keyword tracking tools to look for spikes in negative conversations for clients including Nintendo and the BBC.
Even then we understood the importance of how to spot fake news and effective social listening. Accurate information is vital when it comes to helping CEOs and Comms teams respond effectively to issues and crises.
As well as helping clients establish social monitoring and escalation processes for issues and crises, we also create tailored crisis communications training programmes for teams ranging from 5 to 500.
We develop bespoke workshops for Boards and communications teams, working through complex and realistic scenarios in real-time, often alongside Business Continuity Managers.
Our immersive training sessions overlay social media complaints with media calls and stakeholder enquiries. We create a realistic scenario which puts diverse teams under the sorts of pressure they might well find themselves in. And teams learn exactly how their reactions change the way a situation unfolds.
We monitor how teams deal with a situation, and then make recommendations to improve their access to information, decision-making and communications approaches in future.
Recent crisis training scenarios include IT failures, hacking/data-breaches, terrorist attacks, consumer-activist boycotts and weather-related incidents.
What do we do?
Our ‘four stage’ approach to crisis management and crisis communications
At the heart of our crisis communications training and consultancy is a four stage process we developed to help clients develop their crisis plans. This process has since been adopted by both Econsultancy and Brandwatch in their advice.
Identification
What has happened?
How do we know?
Evaluation
How serious is the issue to our business?
How serious is the issue for our reputation?
Escalation
Who do we need to alert and involve?
How can we contact them?
Response
What are we doing about it?
What are we saying?
How are we communicating it - to everyone who needs to know?
From the blog
A misinformation crisis for Metro Bank
Spare a thought for the comms team at Metro Bank, facing a possible run on the bank due to fake news and misinformation spread via
Crisis Communications – inside Facebook
The Christchurch shootings, and their live-broadcast shocked the world. The social media companies immediately had to roll out two different crisis communications plans, to deal with two different things.
