It started with one photo. A customer bought a drink from a shop, found it had gone off, photographed it and posted it online with a simple accusation: this company sells expired products. Within hours strangers piled into the comments with stories of their own. People screen-grabbed it and forwarded it to WhatsApp. Within 24 hours the story had legs, and my client wanted to put out a public statement immediately.

For a ministry, a company or any African institution, this is what a reputational crisis looks like now. It does not wait for the evening news, and it does not respect office hours. I will come back to how we handled that drink. First, here is the protocol I use with clients, and what I tell every leadership team before the photo appears.

The expired drink that could have been a scandal

Back to that photo. Years ago I worked with a manufacturer in West Africa. The company sold wholesale, never retail, so the drink in the picture had passed through an independent shop before it reached the customer.

None of that mattered online. People who had never had a bad experience with the brand joined in, and it became a bigger story: companies always do this, they are always selling us expired goods. My client was in a panic and wanted a public statement out that day.

I advised against it. In my experience the first 72 hours of a social media crisis matter most, and every crisis has a life cycle. A story like this one would burn out in about three days. A public statement on day one would only feed it and give it a new dimension.

So we went to the source instead. I contacted the customer privately and apologized. We asked them to bring the product back to us or to the shop, and we compensated them. Once the problem was solved, we asked if they would take the post down, and they did.

Only then did we speak publicly. The statement apologized, explained the difference between a manufacturer and the independent retailers who store and sell its products, and committed to keep educating those retailers on how to store drinks so they reach customers as they left the factory. We fixed the problem first and told the story second.

The first hour

The first hour is not for statements. It is for three things.

1. Listen. Track the conversation. Read the comments. Look at what people add when they reshare. Where is sentiment leaning, and where is the narrative going?
2. Brief leadership. Tell them it has happened, that you have seen it and are watching it, and give them one to three courses of action if it reaches a certain point. Leadership should never hear about a crisis from social media first, and they should hear a plan alongside the problem.
3. Capture the original. Screenshot the post and the early comments exactly as they are. People edit and delete. If the story changes, you need a record of how it began.

When silence works, and when it is a mistake

Every crisis has its own DNA and its own life cycle, so there is no single rule. But there are patterns.

Silence can work when something has already happened and cannot be undone or changed, and there is simply no angle to take. Saying something for the sake of it only extends the story.

A holding line often works better. You do not always need to act. Sometimes you only need to say you have seen it, you are aware, you are sorry for the impact on people, and you are investigating. Then tell the public when you will come back with more, and give yourself up to 72 hours to do it.

Silence is a mistake when the problem is not an event but a narrative: a story everyone is repeating and assuming is true. “It isn’t true” is not a strategy. If you can set the facts straight and give people a fuller picture while others are offering a partial one, you should. Silence in that moment lets someone else write your story.

WhatsApp has no firebreak

When a bush fire spreads, you can cut a firebreak around it and give it nothing more to burn. WhatsApp voice notes and forwarded messages took the firebreak away. There is no containment. Something that happens in Freetown on Monday is in Washington, DC and China by Tuesday, because everyone is in the same groups, and that is where stories live and breathe.

That changes the response. The old model was a press release and a wait for the morning papers. The new rule is simple: respond in the channel where the crisis broke. If the story is moving on WhatsApp, your answer has to move on WhatsApp too, at the same speed.

Prepare like it is a fire drill

Most buildings never catch fire, yet everyone runs fire drills. Institutions should treat crises the same way. Agree in advance what you will do if a given thing happens: your first course of action, which channels you will use, and who will speak, in what voice and on what platform. When the plan already exists, nobody panics.

Culture matters too. Accept that risk is part of the work you do. Something you never expected will happen one day. A leadership team that knows that will stay calm when it does.

Who should speak?

Whoever speaks when things are good. If the CEO is the one who always shares the good news, the CEO has to face the public when things go wrong. If a spokesperson has built that relationship, it should be the spokesperson. People give leeway to the voice they already trust. Hand a crisis to a stranger or a third party, and the public may conclude you are not taking it seriously. In a crisis, people want to hear from leadership, and they want to be reassured.

Your brand is your reserve

In a recent piece I argued that Sierra Leone is not a narco state, and that our nation brand is ours to defend. The same is true for any institution. Once a label sticks, it is stuck.

So keep asking: how do we want people to think about our business, our leadership, our culture? Then feed that story consistently, year after year. If people already know you as trustworthy, empathetic or inclusive, a crisis that cuts against that will meet doubt: “I heard that, but it doesn’t sound like them.” That benefit of the doubt is earned long before the crisis. Build the brand, stay consistent, and defend it.

Recovery, a month later

Online, most crises follow a 72-hour life cycle. Unless the story keeps being fed by response and counter-response, it fades in about three days. I cannot remember an institutional crisis I have watched that was still trending after 30 days.

But the public forgetting is not the same as recovery. Inside the institution, the consequences are still real. A month later, recovery means asking: how do we stop this from happening again? How do we strengthen our response? What did we learn, for better or worse, that will help next time?

And sometimes recovery means growth. Handle a crisis with courage under fire, and you can come out with a bigger following: new fans and people who are now invested in your institution and ready to defend it.