I've been debating whether or not I wanted to jump on the bandwagon and address yesterday's social media debacle with Kenneth Cole. If you're not familiar with what happened, both Nancy Myrland and Gini Dietrich wrote great posts that also recap it here and here (see full article below for links).

I decided that I did want to add my two cents - I was certainly dismayed by Cole's tweet yesterday, though not surprised. If you've driven down the FDR in Manhattan over the last ten years, you've seen his snarky political billboards on the side of the road. Why I think non-politicians shouldn't use their power and money to push their political philosophies on the rest of us is a whole other post, but I thought Cole really stuck his foot in his mouth yesterday.

As Nancy mentioned in her post, he needs some serious crisis communications work - we had a speaker on this very topic back in 2007, so I thought I'd dig through my conference report archives and share some of his wisdom with you. Although I'm particularly disgusted by what Cole said yesterday, social media and other gaffes can happen to the best of us, and we need to know what to do if we're in the same situation.

Harry Rhulen, CEO of Firestorm, started out by sharing with our delegates that having an appropriate crisis management plan in place for business continuity is something that's necessary for all organizations - no matter their size. His talk focused on disaster planning - such as took place in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, and the devastation of hurricane Katrina - but a lot of his lessons can be applied to self-created crises as well...