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If I know one thing to be true about social media and its use during a business crisis, it’s that most of what we know on the topic will be obsolete in 12–18 months. But there are still lessons we can learn from anecdotes, examples of trial-and-error and theory that provide a guide for how we can implement social media in our crisis communication.
First, let’s make sure we are all singing from the same songbook by defining social media. Chris Heuer, in his Social Media Club Louisville blog, defines the term in a couple hundred words. Here is a condensed version of his definition: “Social media is redefining how we relate to each other as humans and how we as humans relate to the organizations that serve us. While it is commonly represented by blogs, podcasts, vlogs, wikis, user-generated content, and social networks, it is not about those specific things as much as it is about what happens around and because of those things. This includes most notably the ability and desire to easily share with each other.”
In contrast, the definition of a crisis is less ambiguous and more nuts-and-bolts. The Institute for Crisis Management, also headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, defines a crisis as, “Any problem that triggers negative stakeholder reactions that impact the organization’s business and financial strength.” Further more, it says there’s no crisis until one of your stakeholders finds out. Until that point, you have a business management problem that, if fixed effectively, no one ever hears about.
I was asked recently if I thought social media tools are good for organizational communication, or if we communicators would be better off if the only tweets we heard came from the woods. Well, that’s a little like asking if we would have healthier children if video game systems had never been invented. The problem isn’t with the tools; it’s with how we use them.
Crisis communication tools
Texting
Universities in the U.S. learned a great deal from the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy in 2007. The shootings spurred development of—and budgets for—ways to text students on and off campus in the event of an emergency. It’s a great use of social media, but it can be a double-edged sword. In 2008, a 911 call claimed that someone was on the Western Kentucky University campus with a gun. Twenty minutes later, a text was sent that shots were fired. Both stories turned out to be false. (Accuracy of our messages is a discussion for another day.) One panic-stricken mother drove for an hour to save her child at the school, only to learn the stories were false after she arrived. She was angry with the university for overreacting. But what if the school had waited to verify the information before telling students? We all know which is the worse of these two scenarios. It’s better to be criticized for overreacting than for not reacting at all.
Web sites
Web sites are another tool for reaching stakeholders during a crisis. However, more often than not, if I check a company’s web site 24 hours or more after news of a crisis breaks, based on the information on the web site you would think that everything in the organization was still sunshine and puppy dogs. Most organizations still don’t get it when it comes to social media and crisis communication. They are still unprepared for a crisis and pretend that just ignoring it will somehow make it go away. Instead, organizations need to learn how to use the tools at hand. A simple news release usually won’t get the job done these days. Usually, the first place media and company stakeholders go for information about a crisis is to the company’s web site. Remember that your web site is a critical tool when delivering messages about a crisis.
More and more organizations are turning to dark sites to handle a crisis. These are pre-developed, non-public web pages with pre-approved messaging and documents that can be activated to the live Web quickly. There are differing philosophies about activating dark sites. Some choose to bypass the organization’s home page and take viewers automatically to the dark site. That’s the course Peanut Corporation of America chose when it had to recall some of its products last year. I prefer a link on the home page to the dark site (or vice versa), leaving reporters and other stakeholders with access to the usual background information.
Web sites can of course also be used against your organization. My favorite story involves Holland and Knight, the legal giant based in Florida. Someone sent out tweets, up to 20 a day, linking readers back to HKLaw Investigator, a site that lists “information, articles, and complaints involving Holland & Knight attorneys.” Neither this blog or the Twitter page belonged to Holland & Knight.
Apparently, some savvy insider decided to get even over some real or imagined hurt he suffered from the organization. The site links to articles such as “Five lawyers leave Holland & Knight in part because of conflicts of interest” and “The Disappearing Associate... Valentine’s Day Massacre: Holland & Knight fired 70 lawyers and 173 staff.” The good news for H&K is that no one is keeping the site up to date any longer. The bad news is that it’s still out there for everyone to see.
Often an organization’s first instinct is to respond to something negative that’s not true or only partly true. This reaction is the same in traditional media as in social media. But organizations should ask some key questions before responding. These questions include: Who is likely to see the negative news, and am I going to care? If I respond, how many more stakeholders important to me will see it than if I let it slide?
The challenge for us as communicators is to seek creative ways to use social media for our crisis communications, and not be surprised when the same social media are used against us. Love it or hate it, social media can be our friend. And these tools are not going to go away; they will only continue to evolve and grow.
Dan Hicks, ABC, has been a journalist and business communicator for 30 years. He currently serves as senior consultant with the Institute for Crisis Management headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Dan also has held communication positions at Rohm and Haas, Westinghouse, Rockwell International, and Boise Cascade. He earned an IABC Gold Quill Award in 1994. Dan can be contacted at
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