Prepare for the "hit by a bus" scenario

Aug 3

I have a deep and abiding love of disaster movies – movies where the world is about to end, cities plunge into the sea, arctic air freezes whole continents in seconds and massive tsunami waves wipe out entire coastlines in one shot. 2001, Day After Tomorrow, Cloverfield, Armageddon... I love them all. It is therefore extremely ironic that much of my work is focused on avoiding disaster – on avoiding what I lovingly call the “hit by a bus scenario.”

At its core, the concept is simple: Your team should never be in a position where you would be SOL if someone got hit by a bus and was suddenly 100% unexpectedly out of commission.

If you’re the leader of your team, let’s put it another way: your team should be able to do everything whether you’re present or not, including fill in for you. Especially with the real-time nature of social media, “We can’t respond because we're locked out of the Twitter account” is not an excuse that is going to fly in the middle of a crisis.

Let’s play a game. Fill in the blanks: “We would be really screwed if ________ (person) got hit by a bus because (s)he is the only one who knows _______ (where X is or how to do X).”

If your brain quickly filled in the blanks, you have not prepared for the hit by a bus scenario. If you found multiple ways you could have filled in the blanks, you are really not ready.

Political unrest, economic disruption, global pandemic and murder hornets – so far 2020 has been one for the books. And with all of this chaos and all of these unpredicted crises swirling around us, my main question for you is, have you prepared your team and your social infrastructure for the next crisis? What if someone gets hit by a bus?

Unfortunately, in my experience, I’ve found that many big companies with very complex social media structures are not ready. I attribute this to two factors:

1) The way social media grew up at most big companies. In the beginning, companies didn’t know what to do with social. So generally someone from marketing or communications who showed some vague interest in social media was assigned to oversee it. Eventually teams grew from one to two and two to three. But the sad truth is that social media teams are chronically understaffed, and that means most of their time is spent simply covering the bases and trying to sleep occasionally.

2) The nature of our work. Social media is engineered to always be about the crisis du jour and living in the moment. There’s not a lot of stepping back and taking a breather for social media teams – especially now when teams are managing about six crisis comms plans simultaneously.

My argument would be that now is the PERFECT time to do some thinking about your vulnerabilities. With everyone working from home and so many crises brewing, it may be crucial preparation. In my consulting work, I’ve had clients tell me “When so-and-so goes on vacation, we just kind of all pitch in and try to cover everything.” Or “I’m not sure where XX is stored. So-and-so just handles that.” This is a really dangerous way of operating, especially once you reach a certain scale. Just as you personally store copies of your will and power of attorney in a place where your loved ones can find them in case of an emergency, you need to do the same to protect your social media infrastructure. If you’re starting from scratch, I’d focus on these three areas first:

Passwords: Make sure all of your passwords are stored and protected in a place where people who need them can access them. Better yet, buy a password management tool like LastPass or Keeper Security to do this in a secure and safer fashion (big spreadsheets are not very safe). There should never be a password that only one person knows or can access. And remember to include less-obvious passwords like your company bitly account, stock photo platforms, DAM and the Gmail accounts tied to your YouTube channels.
Admin access: Make sure systems including all tools, Business Manager, Campaign Manager, Ads Manager, etc. have at least two admins so there’s a backup in case the primary admin is suddenly unavailable. That goes for Facebook pages, LinkedIn channels and approval teams too. You should never be stuck because you are lacking admin rights. (NOTE, if someone else like your agency owns your stuff, this is even more problematic. Read my post here.)
SOPs: Again due to the way social media teams grew at most companies, there is a lot of institutional knowledge buried in the head of the team members who have been there the longest. Chances are extremely high that there are some processes and procedures that have been developed over time that have never actually been written down because the knowledge is kept in one person’s head and has never been shared with others. What if that person gets hit by a bus today? Document those standard operating procedures and put them in a shared place. (This is also very helpful if your company has an internal audit group that comes knocking every now and then.)

I hate to seem so negative. When I speak about this topic at conferences, people sometimes come up to me and say “We do the same thing at our company but we call it what if someone won the lottery because it’s more positive.” OK fine. You can call it whatever you want. But the truth is that most sudden departures on social media teams are not because someone won the lottery. It is also true that disasters are not positive events, especially from a comms point of view. Don’t be the city that gets wiped out by the tsunami. Prepare for hit by a bus.