About Brian Lee Brian Lee, APR, is the president of Revelation PR, Advertising & Social Media, as well as a part-time lecturer on social media at Madison Area Technical College. Business Magazine named Brian to its "40 Under 40" list in 2012, and PRSA-Madison named him its 2013 Communicator of the Year. Outside of Revelation, Brian is the editor-in-chief of Madison Startups, an online publication that covers startup news in town, and he runs EatDrinkMadison.com, a Madison, Wisconsin, restaurant and bar guide that is searchable by amenities.   Let’s discuss reputation and crisis management. “it has become more important lately, especially with social media speeding up the news cycle that something that you could let sort of hide or fester in the old days gets really exposed very quickly these days.   Tell us the difference between reputation and crisis management. “reputation management is everything you do basically before an incident occurs, you are [inaudible] doing reputation management to help maintain and protect your brand, shape, perceptions, and provide crisis resiliency. Meanwhile, crisis management or crisis communications is everything that occurs after an incident happens. So, this is your doing crisis management to help restore your rebuild trust and reestablish a reputation.”   Why is having a good reputation important? “when you have a good reputation, people are more likely to forgive you after an incident because it's out of character and the vice versa is true. Then there's the business case. A Deloitte study shows that when an organization's reputation is damaged, there's a decrease in revenue, customer's brand value and/or stock price. In fact, uh, some number, like 87% of CEOs worldwide said reputation risk is the most important strategic risk their organizations are facing.”   When talking about reputation management, what are some of the first things, first steps that a business or organization should look at? “think about it like a campaign. And with any campaign, it's important to start with your goals. So, in this case, list your business goals first and then come up with corresponding reputation goals.”   Say something happens at your company that's really positioning you in a negative way. How is your organization going to recover from that? “The first thing I tell people in companies is that you need to talk to all your internal audiences first. That might be staff, volunteers, board of directors, et cetera. They need to know what's going on, what the company's doing. It also helps improve morale. And it kills the rumor mill.”   Do you have a case study that you could share with us? “it's a little old, but people know it, it's United Airlines, and this occurred back in 2017. And just to remind listeners out there is that United Airlines had a flight that was oversold. They needed to put on their own crew members. So, they asked for volunteers. Finally, they had to actually forcibly remove a passenger…”   What's changed in your world since the last time we chatted/recorded? “I launched the corporate event planning business called the revelation events and I was also just named an entrepreneur in residence at Madison area technical college.”   Let's dive deeper into your business. Who do you primarily work with? “Revelation: We primarily work with hospitality clients, realtors, developers, associations, tech, and B2B companies. And although our clients do span the state and the country, our main specialty is helping clients win Madison.”   How can you be a resource to your network and mine? “one of the things you mentioned in the introductions, I am also the editor in chief of a newspaper here in Madison. We cover all the startups and tech and biotech and so forth going on. It's been interesting because there's been a lot of communities in the Midwest that sort of want to replicate what Madison has in terms of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. So, for example…”