Crisis Management and the Half-Second News Cycle - GCI Group looks at how traditional crisis management approaches must be adapted to manage crises effectively

Before the Internet, companies had the relative luxury of managing crises in 24-hour news cycles since that is how the media operated. Today, business issues and corporate crises escalate instantaneously because hundreds of thousands of posts on blogs, and within forums, social networks, newsgroups and wikis are created every half second, sometimes to report on corporate issues and crises. We call this phenomenon the "half-second news cycle."


Traditional crisis management approaches developed prior to the advent of digital media -- and the half-second news cycle that exists today -- must be adapted to manage crises effectively.

There are a number of recent crisis situations that escalated online initially that can be studied to understand "what works" and "what doesn't," but "best practices" will only be understood in the coming years.

Fundamentally, companies must understand online conversations
around their brand and be able to respond very rapidly and transparently via the same digital media channels through which news is spread by smart mobs.