Does it feel like the world is fraught with crises?

Swine Flu.  Financial meltdown.  Bankruptcy.  Banks failing the government’s stress test.  Excessive executive compensation.

The nature of crisis hasn’t changed, but the way crises emerge has.  And the way we counsel clients has, too.  Bottom line:  companies must aggressively anticipate problems before they draw public attention.

Thanks to the Internet, the filters that once governed what became news – professional reporters and editors who made decisions about what got media attention and what didn’t – are losing influence.  Today, blog posts are just as likely to lead to public backlash as government probes or traditional media inquiries.  This Internet-driven, half-second news cycle is increasing both the volume of communication and the risk for clients.

As a result, crises emerge from nowhere and last forever as digital muckrakers increasingly take over turf that was once the exclusive domain of traditional journalists and consumer advocates.  Consider several recent examples:

• A patient posting complaints about her cosmetic treatment on www.RealSelf.com, gets the attention of a major market TV reporter.
• An online campaign to ban the chemical bisphenol A from baby bottles draws support from regulators, fueling increased attention online and in traditional media.
• Blogger complaints about executive pay leads to the resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner, the loss of the board chairman job by Bank of America CEO Richard Lewis and the exit of Robert Nardelli as Chrysler’s chief executive.

Traditionally, companies identified a crisis when the media called.  Waiting that long today will leave a client exposed.  Media attention is now a lagging indicator of a problem – coming well after customers, investors, partners and consumers have learned of the crisis.

To manage corporate reputations today, companies must establish early-warning systems that continually monitor what people are saying about them – online and off.  And, executives must aggressively defend their companies’ reputations in even the most isolated forums.

What sites will an early-warning system monitor?  The specific list must be tailored to a client’s business.  However, they fall into four categories:

• Company sources. Generally, someone at every company is aware of looming crises.  The challenge is to make executives aware of those issues early, so that companies can prepare.  Our role is to help companies tap into those internal information sources.
• Consumer-generated media.  Blogs and Web sites focused on the company’s business, influential bloggers, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and others all can fuel both positive and negative publicity.  The key is to focus on sites that are influential within the company’s space and monitor those sites aggressively.
• Professional media.  Most business and industry trade media have Web sites to publish stories in real time.  And some media only publish online.  Monitoring selected sites will allow companies to quickly identify potential problems.
• Regulatory change.  Some companies are extremely susceptible to changes in the regulatory environment.  For these organizations, it’s critical to monitor for hints of threatening change in the regulatory or legislative environment.

To be most useful, early-warning systems should monitor news and comment about your client and its leading competitors. 

But monitoring can also pay dividends if it identifies competitors’ weaknesses that can be exploited.  Because in the world of half-second news cycles, nimbleness is more than a way to protect a company’s reputation.  It’s also the way to identify the market’s quickly changing demands.