From Ragan: Elizabeth Cook on Rethinking Preparedness in Crisis Response

As a leader of FleishmanHillard’s corporate affairs team, Elizabeth Cook has shaped executive visibility strategies and the firm’s point of view across media, events and digital platforms.

Now she speaks to Ragan’s Isis Simpson-Mersha for their latest How I Got Here spotlight. Here’s an excerpt:

Ragan: AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes have raised the stakes for crisis response. How should executives rethink preparedness in a world where credibility can be undermined in seconds?

Cook: In a word, vigilance. And it’s not one team’s responsibility — every tool and team has blind spots, so it takes organization and coordination across social media managers, community managers, social care teams and issues and crisis monitoring, with everyone bringing a “see something, say something” mindset. From there, it’s about making sure you can move fast through the playbook — verify the facts, work with the platforms, push your statement and don’t neglect the human stakeholders involved.

Read Cook’s full interview including how two decades of advising Fortune 100 companies, government agencies and NGOs through high-stakes moments shaped her approach to crisis leadership today.