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Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba, talk about the McDonald’s social media flap from this week, the need for companies to have a “radar screen” through a command center or social media monitoring center, and a bit about crisis management and crisis communications.
Show Notes / Links:
- McDonald’s twitter hack
- Bryghtpath – Crisis Management
- Bryghtpath – Crisis Communications
- Bryghtpath Case Study – Intelligence Center
- Bryghtpath Case Study – Crisis Frameworks
Episode Transcript
| Bryan Strawser: | Hey there, it’s Bryan Strawser. I’m the Principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath, and with me is.
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| Jen Otremba: | I am Jen Otremba, and I am a senior consultant at Bryghtpath.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Jen just joined the company, I don’t know, it’s been about a month now.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, about a month.
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| Bryan Strawser: | But Jen and I had previously worked together at our former employer where we have stolen her away to help our clients with a number of crisis management, business continuity areas. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, I’m very excited to be here. Yeah, so prior to Bryghtpath I was with Target Corporation actually with Bryan. But I was there for about 10 years or so. I worked in crisis management and workplace violence prevention in my most current role, and my parallel career that I’ve had from that is I’ve been in the military for almost 20 years as well.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I was waiting for you to say that you had this hobby of flying Black Hawks, but it’s not really a hobby.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, I do, I fly. I’m an instructor pilot for the Medevac company in Minnesota, flying Black Hawks as a part-time job.
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| Bryan Strawser: | So Jen and I are in, we’re in Boston today with a client. We’ve been here since Monday morning helping them with business continuity effort, and we’re recording this right before we head off to the airport to fly back home from one cold climate to another. But we were discussing right before we started the recording about what we were going to talk about today, and Jen suggested that we talk about something that happened this morning, which is the McDonald’s hacked Twitter account, allegedly.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, it’s crazy.
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| Bryan Strawser: | So what happened, Jen? There’s a tweet from McDonald’s on their corporate Twitter account and it was probably not, well, certainly wasn’t intended to be sent out by McDonald’s. But what did the tweet say?
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, shall we read it? It says, “@realDonaldTrump You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have @BarackObama back. Also, you have tiny hands.”
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| Bryan Strawser: | So probably not the marketing strategy that the McDonald’s marketing team had in place-
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, I’m [crosstalk 00:02:27] that corporate didn’t approve that messaging.
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| Bryan Strawser: | McDonald’s is claiming, at least according to CNBC, that they were hacked. But most people aren’t going to care. They’re going to realize that, they’re going to see this and immediately start thinking about McDonald’s, and they’re going to tie this to McDonald’s.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right now it doesn’t matter, because that’s what people saw, so they’re going to believe.
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| Bryan Strawser: | That’s what people were seeing, right, and I have to imagine this has been, it was posted at 6:16 a.m. this morning. It’s probably been retweeted and shared tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of times before it was even removed. But what can companies do … Well, first of all, there’s the issue of the company may not even know that this had happened, so what can companies do in terms of a radar screen to figure out that these threats like this are coming at them?
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. What we’ve done in the past in organizations that we’ve worked for, both at Target and in the military for that matter, there’s always some sort of an operations center, or a team of people that are watching out for these types of threats if you will that come in, and identifying them hopefully right away or quickly.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We’ve talked about this idea before, although I don’t think we’ve talked about it on the podcast, about companies can build these command centers or operations centers or social media monitoring center I think is what City of Minneapolis calls theirs.
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| Jen Otremba: | Fusion center as well.
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| Bryan Strawser: | A fusion center, we’ve seen that in our own world in the past. But it’s really a place where you have these different sources of information and intelligence coming in, so that you have a way to consistently respond to something that’s going on. You worked in the command center when you were at Target. What did you see that was always coming in there in terms of things that you had to react to? What are some examples?
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. What we did, we had a group of very smart people that were monitoring many different news outlets, both online as well as even TV news outlets. We had a series of TV screens that showed all of the different major networks, so they were able to identify when things hit the media right away. They also answered the phones, so when there was issues and people were calling in and letting us know from various locations, outside of the headquarters location, we were able to react to it quite quickly.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Obviously, television is one way that you can do that. There’s opensource information like social media, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat. I’m actually old enough at this point, I don’t use Snapchat, and my kids will probably ruin this for me in the future I’m sure. So there’s social media, there’s all of the online news that’s available, subscription or otherwise. There’s also proprietary intelligence or information that you can get like weather information, or very detailed specific weather information. You can purchase intelligence, particularly about other countries and events that are going on there. But you can also get a lot of free information from public–private partnerships that are out there, particularly from the US government. Minnesota Fusion Center. We talked about fusion centers, states have fusion centers. There’s usually some that, Minnesota is one that pushes information out to the private sector. The FBI has a couple units that do that.
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| Jen Otremba: | They do. Is that one geopolitical?
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| Bryan Strawser: | Proprietary resource like Geopolitical Futures or Stratfor are two that we use here at Bryghtpath. The US State Department also has the Overseas Security Alliance Counsel.
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| Jen Otremba: | FEMA pushes information.
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| Bryan Strawser: | FEMA pushes out info and often your state emergency management agency will do something similar. Perhaps not as comprehensive, but focused on that one state.
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| Jen Otremba: | State, county, city emergency management office often does that, yeah.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Yeah. We get information from the City of Minneapolis, although we’re not in Minneapolis anymore, we still have clients that are in Minneapolis.
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| Jen Otremba: | That’s right, we’re not.
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| Bryan Strawser: | No, we’ve moved. Those are all resources that might be available. There’s also some commercial social media monitoring applications that are out there. They’re much more expensive, like Radian6 and Cision and others that are north of a hundred thousand dollars I believe on an annual basis. But if you’re a company like McDonald’s, monitoring your Twitter reputation might be something of more importance today than it was yesterday, if you have an event like this.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, and then what do you do? You have all this information coming in, what do you do with that information, Bryan?
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| Bryan Strawser: | You just put it up on the screen and have something for people to come visit.
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| Jen Otremba: | And let the leadership freak out.
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| Bryan Strawser: | And let leaders freak out. But no, you have to have a process, right. You have this information that comes in, and you have to have a way to triage what’s happening, and you have to have protocols that have triggers. You have protocols or standard operating procedures, but you have some written document that has triggers and thresholds that tell you, tell the team what they need to go do, and appropriately escalate those situations to the right team or the right leader to be able to deal with a situation if that’s occurring.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. In our previous team, we had the people that would collect all the data and the information and they put it together and they push it out to what we called an incident lead at the time. Then the incident lead would then help to determine whether or not that was a valid threat that was coming in and what to do with that information. They were a specialized trained person that was able to collect all that information and figure out what to do next.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Their job was really to shepherd that situation through a process where roles were clearly defined, that there was an escalation path, there was a single source of truth for communicating what was going on. There was a good crisis framework as we would describe that, that covers all of those things and puts the decision in front of the right leader. It gets complicated because you have these situations that come in that are perhaps more of a physical security, life safety focus, like a disruption or a protest internationally where you have people at risk. You could have more of a reputational issue, like what McDonald’s dealt with this morning, or maybe your communications team really has point.
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| Jen Otremba: | And will be dealing with [crosstalk 00:09:04].
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| Bryan Strawser: | And will, they’re going to dealing with this one for a while. Or you could have an information security issue, a data breach or a cyber security event, or you could have some executive misconduct, financial problem that’s of a totally different nature. But we always encourage companies to have one approach to dealing with that in terms of the same process with the same people at the table, bringing information forward in a consistent way. For senior leaders to be both informed and to be involved at the right level for decision-making.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right, to avoid the freak out.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Avoid the freak out. Yeah, we definitely do not want any freaking out going on.
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| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, and a team that I think leadership really trusts to be doing what they’re doing. I think that leadership trust is really important there, so that leadership isn’t coming in and wanting to know every detail here and there, they know it’s being handled at the lowest level.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Yeah, and that they’re involved where appropriate. Where they have outlined, you know, hey, it’s the CEO, this is where I want to be involved or I want to be the decision-maker, as opposed to hey, crisis team, go manage this situation, but keep me informed.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. Let me know when I need to step in, right.
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| Bryan Strawser: | There’s maybe some personal differences there, but usually you’re looking for your issues of big strategic importance and of reputational importance for that direct C-suite involvement, and your situations that are lower on the scale of severity are being handled by, I don’t want to say worker bees, but they’re handled through the normal process, where you’re informing the executives instead of having them make the decisions.
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| Jen Otremba: | Right. Or there are processes in place for that incident, so yeah.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We at least hope there are processes in place for incidents like that.
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| Jen Otremba: | In theory, yes.
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| Bryan Strawser: | These are things we do here at Bryghtpath, I think to wrap this conversation up. We’ve worked with a number of companies on building nerve centers. We’ve had situations, we’ve had these called everything from a command center to an operations center to a global operations center to a GSOC, a global security operations center. My favorite still remains the intelligence center we made for, or we worked on the processes for a company out on the west coast that operates globally. But whatever you call it, the real lesson here is that you need some kind of radar screen, some kind of nerve center that brings all of this information together, and you have a structured process that allows you to escalate that within the company to get it resolved.
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| Jen Otremba: | That’s dedicated to do that.
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| Bryan Strawser: | That’s dedicated just to do that, that’s right. If that’s of interest to you, if that’s something we can help you with here at Bryghtpath, we certainly would be interested in talking with you further about that. I believe we have a case study on our website we’ll link in the show notes about the intel center that we built for our client on the west coast. With that, that’s the end of this episode of Managing Uncertainty, and we look forward to talking with you in the coming weeks.
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| Jen Otremba: | Definitely.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Thank you.
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| Jen Otremba: | Thanks!
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