Social media is becoming more and more important to an organization’s response to a crisis. While my own crisis communication experience is with public health emergencies, like pan flu epidemics and the threat of anthrax attacks, other crisis comm pros are dealing with reputation management, negative publicity, liability lawsuits, product recalls, etc.
Thanks to social media tools, there is no reason a crisis communication pro shouldn’t have these tools in his or her toolbox, ready to respond to an emergency within minutes, rather than hours, or even days.
Whether you’re a government agency dealing with a massive emergency, or a famous athlete caught with his pants down, you need to be able to respond quickly and truthfully. You need to get ahead of the speculators and talking heads whose grinding of the rumor mill can do more harm than the actual truth.
Many organizations, especially government agencies, are still using old-school media to get their news out. The problem is they’re trying to reach a newspaper audience with timely news, but it’s changed in the last 30 minutes. Or they’re trying to reach the TV news by 3:00 p.m. for a 5:00 broadcast, while most people are still in their cars. And in many cases, broadcast media only spends seconds on your story, and the newspapers are only devoting a few precious inches to your side of the story.
With social media, you can bypass the media filters, reach the greatest number of people, and in many cases, get the news out before the mainstream media. This is especially useful if you have time-sensitive information, like medication dispensing points, product recalls, hours of operation, etc.
I’m not saying you should ignore the mainstream media (MSM), or quit using the old methods. Rather, consider adding social media to your arsenal.
- Blog: A blog is a great way to publish an entire news story. In many cases, the MSM will use your blog as a source. If you’ve done most of the legwork for them, they’re more inclined to use the information you provided. I had one newspaper in Indiana that would reprint my press releases verbatim, I thought about changing my name to “Staff Wire Report” just so I could get the credit.
Strategy: Appoint a blog writer you trust, and give him or her carte blanche in reporting the latest news. - Twitter: Twitter lets you reach people quickly and easily. Create lists of important people who will need to hear your news: journalists, fans, customers, vendors, etc. Don’t just use Twitter for barfing out news though. You can use Twitter to talk with people and establish relationships. If people like you, they’re likely to want to hear your news, making you a trusted news source.
Strategy: Have conversations, provide information, correct misinformation, and answer questions. - Facebook fan page: If you’re a B2C company, nonprofit, or government agency, you need a fan page. If you’re B2B, the debate still rages on. People get their news from different sources, and they get their social media from different tools. So you need to match their information-gathering habits. Since Facebook boasts over 350 million world-wide users, a lot of people are getting their news here.
Strategy: Run your blog and Twitter feeds through your fan page. Follow the conversations people are having on the page, and participate in them. - Analytics: You need to measure your results and see what works. If nothing else, put Google Analytics on your blog, and set up some Google News Alerts. They only updates every 24 hours (Google News can email stories as they appear), but it’s free, and ideal if you’re not trying to monitor events in real time. StatCounter.com is free and up-to-the-minute, although it will only record 500 hits in a day (you can upgrade to the paid version if you need it). We use Yahoo Analytics (paid subscription), because it has real-time updates, and we can graph everything out. To see what people are saying in the social media stream, try something like Radian6 or ScoutLabs.
Strategy: Adopt at least one analytics package, and use it to monitor the success of your social media strategy. Compare it to your traditional methods, and see which tools are bringing you the best results. Plow more time and energy into the successful ones, and see if it’s possible to roll the less-successful ones into your new strategies. - A laptop and wifi network card: I know, this one seems so painfully obvious, it’s ridiculous to even include it. But you’d be amazed at the number of organizations still running on desktops, or laptops without wifi. It’s great to be able to visit any location with free wifi, and logging in — I’m sitting at a Subway restaurant as I’m writing this — but what if you’re in an emergency and you’re in an area without wifi. What do you do if you’re responding to a local emergency, and the fastest Internet connection in town is the dial-up credit card machine at the gas station?
Strategy: Bug your boss until you get a laptop and wifi card (Verizon has the MiFi, a mobile wifi hotspot you carry), and then learn how to use it; these other four tools are useless if you’re ever caught without a laptop and wifi. Use the mobile setup until it’s second nature. If you’re ever caught out during an emergency, you don’t have to pull out the manual just to figure out how to use the wifi card.
There are more tools available than you could ever hope to master, most of them supporting one of these five basics, but these are the ones you can build an entire crisis communication plan around. If you can figure these out, you’ll be miles ahead of those organizations and agencies who are still trying to figure out the fastest way to fax a one-page press release to 500 different newspapers in less than six hours.
Photo: Fire Monkey Fish
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Hey, Erik,
Just wanted to chime in and say thanks for a great article. It always helps to create awareness regarding the tools available for handling a crisis.
You’re absolutely right that, used properly, one could build a communications plan around these tools. But I’d like to emphasize, for those reading this that haven’t been through dealing with communications during a disaster, just how important having the “plan” is.
At NFN we’ve run into a number of organizations with tools out the wazzoo but who didn’t have a plan or communications strategy to make effective use of the tools. I equate it to a team of guys showing up to build a new home with hammers and saws in-hand but no blueprints or steps for getting from point A to point B. They might eventually get that house built… but then again, they may not… and not for lack of trying nor for lack of tools.
And leaders should remember, too, that the same media relations rules apply but may be tougher to enforce with social media. They need to think about what policies prevent employees from using the same tools to leak information or start rumors… and incidents like yesterday’s “hack/mimic” of Huffington Post’s Twitter feed.
These tools can be a great asset if used as part of a larger crisis communications plan, but could be a nightmare if not managed well.
-Chad