Instead of fielding endless private Slack DMs, create a public intake channel for all requests. This system allows the entire team to see the volume of work, enabling better triage and load balancing, while also building empathy with stakeholders who can now visualize the team's true workload.

Before a major sales event like BFCM, prepare plain-text, ready-to-send emergency emails addressing common problems like site crashes or shipping delays. This allows your team to communicate transparently and quickly during a crisis without scrambling to write copy.

The common instinct in a brand crisis is to repeatedly apologize. However, after acknowledging the mistake and the fix, the best path is to stop talking about it. Loyal customers want the brand to return to being trustworthy, and over-apologizing keeps the focus on the failure.

The Royal Mail team was on a free trial of a social listening tool when a PR crisis erupted. This highlights a critical flaw: crisis management infrastructure must be fully implemented and operational *before* it's needed, as there is no time for setup or contract negotiation once a crisis begins.

Companies often bring social media management in-house because they perceive it as less serious than traditional advertising. This is a critical error. Driving real business results through social media is far more complex and difficult than replicating the functions of a traditional creative agency for print or TV commercials.

Effective AI moves beyond a simple monitoring dashboard by translating intelligence directly into action. It should accelerate work tasks, suggest marketing content, identify product issues, and triage service tickets, embedding it as a strategic driver rather than a passive analytics tool.

During a 5x growth period, Fixer's support response times went from 5 minutes to 5 hours, jeopardizing customer trust. The team had only planned for their growth strategies failing, not succeeding. This highlights the critical need to build infrastructure for best-case scenarios, not just worst-case ones.

The risk of a malicious deepfake video targeting an executive is high enough that it requires a formal protocol in your crisis communications plan. This plan should detail contacts at social platforms and outline the immediate response to mitigate reputational damage.

The Royal Mail social media crisis escalated because an interim team lacked established processes and tools. This demonstrates that transitional periods, when systems are not fully operational, are times of heightened risk for brand reputation disasters that can catch unprepared teams off guard.