7. If angry customers began organizing on the Internet, how soon would you know? What would you do?
The vast majority of crises don’t erupt out of nowhere – they actually fester and build up over time. We often don’t see them coming because we simply weren’t looking.
You should develop an active Issues Management Plan and integrate it fully with your Crisis Management plans. Someone in your organization, or contracted to it, should actively be monitoring the external environment for early warning signs of future troubles. The Internet is rapidly growing in importance in this regard.
Someone should regularly be scanning not only the conventional print, radio, and TV news sources, but also the online news sources – and the vast array of informal online communities, blogs, chat rooms, listserves, bulletin boards and discussion forums. If you can identify latent issues early on, you can address them while they’re still tiny, before they grow into company-killers.
