In A Crisis, The First 60 Minutes Are Where Reputation Gets Made

In crisis communications, the most useful instinct is often restraint. But in the first 60 minutes, every force pushes the other way: leadership wants a statement, the press wants a quote, the social team wants something to post, and somewhere in the building, a customer service rep is already apologizing for a problem nobody has officially acknowledged. Whoever controls that hour usually controls the story.

Michele Ehrhart serves as SVP and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at the University of Memphis, a Carnegie R1 research institution, and previously spent more than two decades at FedEx as Vice President of Global Communications, where she managed crisis response through some of the company's highest-profile emergencies. She is the bestselling author of Crisis Compass: How to Communicate When It Matters Most, a practitioner's guide that distills lessons from cybersecurity threats, workplace tragedies, and reputational events that played out on global stages. She believes that what protects reputation in a crisis is the discipline to say less than the moment seems to demand.

"You can wreck a reputation that is centuries old in a matter of minutes if you do not have the discipline to think about what you're going to say and then say it," says Ehrhart, describing the gap between a brand, which is the image an organization projects, and a reputation, which is what the public actually believes. That gap widens fast when leaders react before the facts are settled. The communicator's first job in any crisis is to slow the organization down long enough to get the response right.

Mouth shut, eyes open

"Spilling the tea," a phrase Ehrhart picked up from her teenage daughter, captures the failure pattern that catches even the most resourced comms shops off guard. "You don't want to spill all the tea. So you go out, say what you know. A lot of times, that looks like a holding statement," she says. It is a short, defensive document, written to confirm what is known and to make clear that everything else is still being checked.

What the holding statement buys is room. It puts nothing on the record that the organization might have to take back once the facts are clear. It also resets audience expectations about timing, giving teams a defensible window to fact-find before issuing a fuller response. In the instant crisis era, the holding statement often needs to ship before the C-suite has even confirmed it knows what the crisis is.

Don't unplug the editor

Smaller teams have turned to AI to cover ground they used to cover with headcount. Ehrhart sees the appeal, especially for businesses without deep communications resources, where AI functions as an operational lifeline that can draft, summarize, and scale. The risk shows up when the editor disappears from the workflow. "AI is an incredibly useful tool for small businesses with limited resources. But it cannot replace the human element one hundred percent in a crisis," she says.

A code update at xAI is all it took for the Grok chatbot to start posting antisemitic content at full reach, and the company spent the next week explaining the failure to regulators on two continents. Grok was external and public. The internal version is quieter, and it sits with comms leaders managing AI rollouts, where a single off-tone response from an HR or IT bot can end up on Glassdoor before the team that built it knows what happened.

Don't feed the thread

Day-to-day social execution has its own version of the problem. Ehrhart's rule for an accidental personal post on a corporate account is simple: take it down first, then decide whether the situation needs a light acknowledgment or a more serious one.

When the post was deliberate, and the comments turn negative, the worst move is the one most teams reach for first. "If you read everything they say, react immediately, and go tit-for-tat, nothing good ever comes from that. If you stand behind what you put out there and it wasn't a mistake, give it a minute. Let's see if all the people who have something negative to say stick around," Ehrhart says. Real shifts in sentiment earn a response. Twenty angry replies under a post that is otherwise performing well do not, and the skill is in being able to call which is which under pressure.

The puppy paradox

What looks like discipline on an organic post can look like neglect under a paid one. Unanswered complaints below an active ad are the first thing a potential customer reads, and they shape the click first. Ehrhart's team at FedEx encountered the dynamic in its most absurd form when angry customers began using wholesome posts about puppies to vent about delayed packages. The team rerouted the problem through customer service, pulling them into the social monitoring loop so complaints could be acknowledged in-thread and moved to DMs before they spiraled. "That stopped the negative conversation on it. Not always, but at least it gave you as a brand an outlet," she says.

When the teams sit in different reporting lines and read different dashboards, the puppy posts go unanswered. The fix is shared sightlines and the habit of talking like colleagues who actually work together.

Halting the happy

Workflow is theory until a phone rings at three in the morning. Ehrhart was still at FedEx when an active shooter attack at the company's Indianapolis facility killed eight employees in April 2021. The call woke her up with three facts: active shooter, Indianapolis, already on social media. That was all she needed to know.

FedEx's brand voice at the time was upbeat, colorful, and focused on the joy of shipping and logistics, a tone that cannot coexist with breaking headlines about employees killed on the job. "That is not the tone you need to set when eight of your people were killed in a senseless shooting. I had to call my marketing friends. We gotta go dark on social. You gotta pull all these ads. These ads cannot be running when this headline is breaking," Ehrhart says. The team shut down its social channels and paused digital ads within hours, leaving only the corporate statements crafted to be empathetic, fact-driven, and careful not to outpace what law enforcement would confirm.

Pulling ads across global markets in an afternoon is a scale advantage. The judgment that decides when to do it is available to every organization, and the operational test is a single question. Every piece of active content gets one question from the response lead: help or hurt right now?

Train before the fire

That kind of muscle is built in advance or not at all. Ehrhart's drill design starts with a single question to the executive team about what keeps them up at night, and the top three answers become the scenarios the comms team rehearses.

From there, the working group should stay lean and cross-functional, with people who can do the work and at least one person with the authority to make decisions on the spot. Routing every move back through the entire C-suite is how organizations lose the hour they need. Tabletop exercise frameworks can help structure sessions for teams that want a template to work from, though Ehrhart is clear that the value lies less in predicting the next crisis and more in getting people used to how they will think, feel, and coordinate when one arrives.

"It doesn't have to be elaborate. You're not trying to set people's hair on fire, make it look real, and freak out. But you practice the scenario as if it were happening right now. Okay, what do we do first? Who do we call outside the company?" she says.

Crisis work has a backend most practitioners do not discuss. Ehrhart describes hers plainly. "I am incredibly good in a crisis. I am so calm because I've done it so many times. But afterward, my husband will tell you I'm a hot mess, because then that wave hits you. What you don't want is that wave hitting people in the room. Your job that day is not to be emotional. That's hard, and that takes practice," she says.

Composure is a service the room is told nothing about. The communicators who learn to deliver it know the bill comes home with them, hours after the cameras leave.