Crisis Survival Handbook

The importance of telling the truth yourself

At Brand2Life US, our issues preparedness and management counsel is all centered around three core principles:

1. Tell the truth (not rumors, speculation or opinions)
2. Tell it quicky
3. Tell it ourselves

All good communicators* understand the importance of telling the truth (at least, everything currently known), and telling it quickly. While there is some nuance here, now is an opportune time to unpack tell it ourselves, because we’ve seen a few great, and not-so-great, very public examples this summer.

What it means to “tell it ourselves”

Of course, we want our audiences to hear about developments in our company, good AND bad, from our spokespeople before they hear it somewhere else. That’s table stakes. And as modern communications professionals, we have more tools and channels than ever before to target specific audiences with a message for them. Product marketing can showcase a new offering on social media, while our CEO conducts an interview with an established news outlet, and our CFO hosts a webinar to take investors through our latest quarterly performance, all simultaneously and with very little audience crossover.

But in times of crisis, when brand reputation is at risk, the messenger can matter just as much as the message. In the rush to respond, communications teams too often default to the first available spokesperson within the company to be put in front of the press. This can backfire for several reasons:

• The spokesperson is not knowledgeable about the problem, or not invested in the cause to begin with. This is most common when a C-suite executive or board member is called upon to discuss an emerging crisis with minute technical details (like a cybersecurity intrusion), or back up a questionable corporate policy. We spotted a teachable moment when X CEO Linda Yaccarino had to justify suing their own advertisers a few weeks ago. This was clearly an Elon Musk-driven decision, and it felt forced coming out of her mouth.
• They are not senior enough within the company to demonstrate, “we are taking this matter seriously.” The flipside to the “subject matter expert” problem, spokespeople with a very niche, specific technical role may not carry enough gravitas in the public eye. This is especially true when the aggravating incident has embarrassed partners, caused heavy financial losses, hurt or killed people, or may have future legal ramifications.
• Other organizations are more appropriate to address the situation right now. It’s the communications teams’ responsibility to consider the outsider’s perspective before rushing to comment widely.

Perfect fit spokesperson

So how does a communications leader balance the often-conflicting needs of spokesperson selection? A C-suite leader that has come through the ranks of the industry – ideally even the company, learning a lot about its inner workings along the way, can be your greatest asset in a crisis. Their position lends gravitas to their handling of the situation, but they’ve been close enough to the business to field questions or not get too far over their skis, trying to sound “smart”. If that’s unavailable, recent additions to the leadership team can study up with their lieutenants, and be media trained to handle a detailed crisis interview, should they ever be called upon.

Microsoft and CrowdStrike

Microsoft’s response to July’s CrowdStrike outage was a very good example of quickly choosing the right messenger, based no doubt on an established plan written in “peacetime”. In CEO Satya Nadella, they have a lifetime learner and engineer who spent time at SUN Microsystems before a 32-years-and-counting career at Microsoft.

Early morning reporting focused on blue screens and that Microsoft systems were going down, but Nadella quickly pointed to CrowdStrike as the failure point, first through his own social media channels. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz took responsibility the following day on an interview with The TODAY Show, and Microsoft ceded periodic updates around a diminishing number of persistent outages to more specific, technical and legal experts in the weeks that followed.

*likely everyone reading this