Trump’s plan to drive manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. has rattled the cages of America’s biggest enterprises. In an attempt to prevent jobs from leaving the borders of the United States, the President has taken to highlighting the practices of individual businesses. These attacks have impacted company valuations and forced companies to consider the prospect of bring jobs back into the U.S. — or face hefty import taxes.

Indeed, the random nature of President Trump’s tweets represent a threat to an enterprise’s valuation. For large enterprises, President Trump’s tweet storms are forcing every corporate communications team to evaluate their crisis management and response planning.  While a tweet from Donald Trump may create a doomsday scenario, a crisis can manifest itself in a variety of other ways spanning shareholder activism, product recalls or a security hacking breach. For this blog, let’s explore how companies can quickly Tump-proof their business and be ready for a Twitter-torpedo from the President.

Step 1: Identify your weaknesses

Every large enterprise must first make an honest assessment of their business. Are there any lurking liabilities in the company’s job or hiring practices that can become fodder for Trump? Did the media write any recent press stories that discuss moving jobs or closing manufacturing facilities?  What has been the company’s coverage over the past 12-18 months — and what were the defining issues, sentiment and influencers behind the share of voice?  What has been the dominant share of negative conversation over social media?

A full vetting of dirty laundry with a thorough audit will expose any weaknesses and become the foundation for an effective crisis response plan.

Step 2: Have a response plan at the ready

Based upon the audit conducted in step 1, companies should establish specific crisis scenarios aligned with an appropriate response plan. As part of this process, teams should create documents containing facts, data and arguments that can be used to spin the story back in their favor. Another way to prepare is to create guidelines on how to respond. For example, responding to a tweet from President Trump with an inflammatory comment will rile his most ardent supporters, exacerbating and elongating the news cycle.

If appropriate, companies may want to proactively drive the marketplace narrative. For example, does the company have plans to maintain or expand operations in the United States?  Amazon recently took proactive measures by announcing that the company added an additional 100,000 jobs in the U.S.

Step 3: Monitor the marketplace

Crisis teams cannot constantly monitor the media in search of every negative comment around their brand. To proactively disengage, departments should leverage social and media intelligence to continuously monitor public conversations and sentiment. This way employees can go about their daily tasks knowing that a potential crisis will not slip through the cracks. Through automated alerts, teams can be notified whenever sentiment drops below a certain threshold or there is an abnormal number of mentions (or co-occurrences) around the brand.

Step 4: React fast

Today, Twitter has created the instantaneous news cycle. Now, a single tweet can create a full-blown crisis within minutes. Crisis communications teams need to spring into action the moment a crisis is detected. If teams react and respond too late, the public perception and narrative is baked — and very difficult to change.  For this very reason, communications teams must invest time in a pre-prepared crisis plan.  Augmenting plans with realtime media intelligence will help calibrate the situation and appropriate response.

Step 5: Measure everything

There’s no telling the direction in which a crisis will go and the issues that will be the most contentious. This is why brands should measure absolutely everything possible including sentiment, share of voice, key influencers, impressions, etc.  Any crisis — especially one created by President Trump — will elicit panic throughout the entire enterprise; executives will feel far more at ease when a crisis team demonstrates a complete understanding of the situation and use data to back up their findings. The measurements will help define the path forward, along with the pre-planned crisis response.

President Trump has highlighted the scale and power of digital mediums of communication. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have turned crisis management into an instantaneous problem that can erupt at any minute from anywhere and from anyone (including the President). Corporate Communications departments need to realize the threat digital communications channels pose and put data at the center of their plans to modernize their crisis communications efforts and mitigate any potential PR risk.

If you would like to learn more about how to modernize your crisis communications plan, download our eBook “Ten Ways that Big Data Will Modernize Your Crisis Communications Plan”