I just read a new bad story about a company which lost cards information in the wild. All organizations must have a plan for incident management. Never forget the Murphy’s law: “If anything can go wrong, it will“.
It is vital to include communication in your incident management plan. in both ways: internal and external. Internal communication must provide to the organization members all required information:
- to have a clear view of what’s happening (people don’t like to stay in the dark)
- to know how to perform their job in the best way (business is business)
- to properly communicate to external parties
The last point is critical: at all levels (from the reception to the top-management), people could have contacts with customers, press or partners and must give proper information, no more, no less.
That’s why external communication is important too. Your organization reputation relies on information you provided. Your partners and customers must be aware of your problems. Reactions will be much more positive if they learned from you instead of a third party or, even worse, from the media.
Talking about “media”, new online communication channels can also be used to spread information. Example: Twitter. When I tweeted about the story given as example above, I received two minutes later a reply from a tweeter account belonging to the affected company. Check out its page: @netsolcares. They are monitoring the tweet sphere and reply to each tweet which contains information about their data leak problem. They also provide feedback via their blog. Good communication!