- “Pre-bunking” i.e letting key stakeholders know in advance about potential misinformation can be a good strategy before it takes hold. - Have an up to date crisis management plan in place before the issue arises. - Map all your stakeholders, be ready to communicate quickly and transparently - Ensure your actions match your words. How is your organisation building trust and credibility? - Identify allies and advocates that can back you up. - Employees are crucial in debunking misinformation - leaders who communicate well are more likely to be trusted.

To manage a potential misinformation crisis with stakeholders, it requires a clear and structured approach to ensure trust is maintained. - Quickly gather facts to understand the nature of the misinformation. - Verify the correct information internally. Ensure everyone are on the same page. - Craft a message addressing the misinformation. Keep the message simple, fact-based, and transparent. - Proactively reach out to stakeholders impacted by the misinformation (via email, calls, meetings). - Distribute the corrected information through different communication channels to reach a broad audience. - Conduct a post-mortem to evaluate how well the situation was handled and where improvements can be made for future communication strategies.

A crisis is not the time for original thought. The potential for damaging misinformation about you, your organization, or client, - whether organic or manufactured - should be expected and factored into your crisis planning. The extent of any damage will depend on the impact it has on your most valuable stakeholders. As such, every crisis plan should include a rapid response protocol for reassuring those stakeholders in order of priority - often starting with employees. Ongoing efforts to proactively strengthen reputation and build trust in peace time are essential. Familiarity with leadership and core values will mitigate damage by giving you benefit of the doubt when stakeholders are confronted with troubling, incongruous news.

Informing key stakeholders regarding potential mismatch in advance can be a good approach like early warning signal in which the impact of mismatch can be reduced and probability of further such events can also be controlled.

Debunking/fact checking does not travel as far or as fast as falsehoods. Wherever possible, the key is to get ahead of misinformation in high-risk areas before it begins to spread - map your high-risk areas of vulnerability and begin to proactively communicate your story in those areas to inoculate and build resilience. That, combined with development of a playbook and training teams, is key to preparing for these threats. That said, once misinformation is identified, key steps include: 1. Determine the extent of truth or falsehood Fact-checking as quickly as possible 2. Assess the severity of the narrative 3. Assemble a rapid response team to strategize on the response 4. Communicate directly with stakeholders wherever possible