11 Fifty-Nine – this is not the glamorous location of a luxurious condo building in Manhattan, but the name of the company I recently launched to offer consulting and support in the field of crisis communication.
How did I come up with it? I’ll admit it, as a teenager I was a big fan of Debbie Harry, aka Blondie, and in 1978 I couldn’t get the chorus of her song “11:59” out of my head for weeks:
”Today can last another million years
Today could be the end of me
It’s 11:59, and I want to stay alive”– Debbie Harry (Blondie)
And the notion of “11:59” fits quite well with the context in which many of us work day by day. Because it’s always just before midnight when a crisis is looming. Then time is scarce, good advice is precious, and nerves are on the edge.
The golden hour has shrunk to a golden minute. If at all.
At the same time, 11:59 accurately depicts where we are today in the world of communication. It takes 28 seconds to write a tweet and send it to the entire human race, which is clearly less than a minute. The golden hour of yesteryear has shrunk to no more than a golden minute, if that.
This makes it all the more important to use the time we are all given wisely before a crisis strikes. Here is a list of things you can do in the time before 11:59, with no particular order of priority and no claim to completeness:
- Create a crisis plan that really works
- Brief top management on current issues and possible crisis scenarios
- Simulate a real crisis and run through it with the relevant people in the company to identify weak points
- Fix weak points
- Consider: Who are my stakeholders and how important are they to me in a crisis situation?
- Ask yourself: Do I actually have control over my “owned media,” i.e., my channels? Really? Even if a cyberattack has crippled my IT?
- Train your team
- Dust off the crisis plan – if you can find it
- Ask your web agency whether the dark site is still working
- Where is the key to the cabinet where the crisis response plans are kept?
- Consider together what risks and side effects AI could have for the company—and, of course, what opportunities
I could go on and on. But I only created this list to make it clear to everyone: All of this is important, and none of it can be accomplished in the one golden minute that we often have between the onset of a crisis and the first call from a journalist who already knows more than you do.
So, if it’s 11:59, it’s actually already too late – unless you’ve read this blog article beforehand. And took this as a wake-up call to bring your preparedness up to par.
By the way, I thought long and hard about what would sound better: “Eleven59,” “11 Fifty-Nine”, “11:59”, “11Fifty9”, or “Eleven Fifty-Nine”. In the end, I went with my gut. I don’t have to decide everything myself.