Crises used to be relatively straightforward to manage. Social media have revolutionised things. Mismanaged, a crisis response can snowball into a much bigger threat than whatever event it was that initially triggered it. Social media are credited as a wonderful tool for communicating directly with the consuming public. But they are also perhaps the most dangerous crisis catalyst, virally propagating an event’s fallout, giving word of mouth global proportions, giving a crisis the potential to multiply into an uncontrollable epidemic.