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Sure, if you hear one more time that social media has changed the world of PR and crisis communication, you might just lose it. It’s old news by now. But what does this mean for your day-to-day work? And how does it change your organization’s crisis plan?
Here are six simple steps to help you deal with the new realities of social media, particularly during a crisis.
1. It’s all about listening.
The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP), with four million customers, is the largest public utility in the U.S. After they started using Twitter, including Twitter monitoring, the organization discovered that there were a lot of ongoing discussions about their agency happening on this social media site. Some people made nice comments; others were not so nice.
It’s no surprise these days that there are discussions about organizations happening on social media sites. But many of us are still not used to the idea that we can listen in on them. And we can, to a remarkable degree. Social media give organizations an unprecedented opportunity to hear what people are saying. You can spot trends, identify issues before they really get legs and see how people are responding to messages. Listening is always the first step in effective communication, and the opportunities for listening are greater than ever. By paying attention to the chat on Twitter the LA DWP was able to identify emerging issues and deal with them quickly before they erupted into something more serious.
2. Be fast or be irrelevant.
When flight 1549 hit the Hudson River in New York City in January of last year, it was more than an hour before the president of US Airways was able to make a statement. Wow, an hour! That’s fast, right? Except that in that hour Janis Krums, the bystander who used Twitter and Twitpic to let the world know about the crash, had already conducted a number of interviews with national media. His first was just 35 minutes after the crash, with MSNBC. Within that same hour, dozens of eyewitnesses were reporting what they were seeing. The airlines and response agencies simply were not the focus of media attention, because other sources were available to them faster. Today, you have to communicate at the speed of social media, or by the time you get around to saying something, no one will be listening.
3. Make your web site central.
When you’re sharing what kind of sandwich you are eating, 140 characters is plenty. But if you are relaying vital information about a crisis to those hungry for it, 140 characters doesn’t cut it. Several emergency management operations use Twitter or Facebook to alert their audiences of additional information on their web sites. These communicators understand that bringing people continually back to their site, particularly when it employs interactive tools inviting direct contact, is the best use of social media.
A survey my organization conducted among government communicators made it clear that they correctly perceive social media, such as Twitter, as one of many ways to communicate with their audiences. Your web site, particularly if you control content, can be updated quickly, and should be the primary platform for organizational communication during a crisis.
4. Don’t wait for a crisis to establish your communication channels.
Most of us remember the challenge that Domino’s Pizza faced when several of its employees posted disgusting prank food preparation videos on YouTube. The consensus among crisis communicators was that the organization did a good job of responding to the crisis, but far too late. Domino’s used social media channels in its response, but it took a few days for them to set up their channels because they had not used them or prepared them in advance. Ugliness goes viral in social media in minutes and hours, not hours and days. If you are not already engaging audiences via these channels, it is usually pointless to try to do it after an event is underway. Do it now or wait until the dust settles and then get ready for the next one.
5. Take advantage of the opportunities to communicate directly with your audience.
One organization, in the waning period of a major crisis, shut off their crisis web site even though it was getting 20,000 visits a day. When I asked them why, they said that the media had gone on to other stories and didn’t report what they put up there anyway. PR professionals tend to be like the contractor who only has one tool at his disposal—a hammer. Everything looks like a nail to this contractor. Everything, to too many PR folks, looks like it needs a press release and good media relations. We’ve forgotten that the reason we work with the media was that in the good old days it was the fastest, most efficient means of reaching customers, investors, stakeholders, legislators, regulators, etc. Somewhere along the way, we started thinking that the media is the audience, instead of the means to reach the people we really need to converse with. Now, with social media, there are unprecedented opportunities to talk directly to those people who matter most. If you have 20,000 people coming to you for information, for goodness’ sake, talk to them.
6. Prepare your leadership team.
So you’re the lead communicator for your organization in a worst-case-scenario event. You determine that you are going to put critical information about the crisis out on Twitter, you’re going to send an update on the situation directly to all your stakeholders every 15 minutes, and you’re going to get a video recorded of the CEO and upload it to your organization’s YouTube channel. However, your executive team or CEO says, “What’s Twitter? What’s YouTube?” then reminds you that it’s going to take five hours to get all the attorneys to review any statements.
This gap in approaches to handling a crisis is the biggest obstacle facing communication managers who understand the new realities of crisis communication and social media’s role in it. Now is the time to educate your senior executive team and the lawyers who will be involved about the new demands and realities of communication. You simply can’t do it while in the middle of a crisis. Sure, they’ll have a lot better understanding after they’ve been hammered by a negative social media conversation. But by then it won’t matter to you because you’ll be looking for a new job. My advice: Set up a crisis communication drill that includes social media right now, and make it painfully realistic.
Gerald Baron is the founder and former CEO of PIER Systems, now a part of O’Brien’s Response Management, the world’s most experienced team of response management professionals. PIER is a web-based crisis communication management system used by many federal, state and local governments as well as education, health care and major corporations. |
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