Every company, organization or government should have a crisis management plan. A crisis is like the reaper himself walking through. It kills the employee and management’s morale, makes consumers loose confidence in you, shareholders get pissed with lower stock price, huge public uproar…. You get the picture, it’s as gloomy as the one beside this line.
So how can a company address a criss when they meet with one? What channels should they use?
It is so important that we don’t forget we live in a world where social media has a huge influence on traditional media. Its also good to note that companies can use social media to cut pass traditional media to reach out to consumers more effectively with a more personal touch. This point was made by PR Blooger.com with the jetblue example.
So what are some of the factors which would determine if social media is the right channel to use during a crisis?
1) Level of the crisis:
So what kind of crisis are we talking here? I guess there are various types that would define a crisis and the severity of it.
- Were there deaths involved like a plane crash?
- Is it product default? Poor customer response? Continuous decline in profits?
- Political or religious issues?
At times, social media might not be the best way to go. The SIA SQ6 Plane crash is an example of the perfect way of handling a crisis. But should a similar accident occur (touch wood. Chinese superstition to ward of bad luck) where would social media fit in?
Would having a social networking group help? Lee Aases seems to think it would with facebook. But would it work in an asian context then? Would using blogs or posted videos online for constant updates help? Any1 got any examples of this?
2) Where did the crisis come from?
Was it started by the blogosphere and picked up by the media? Dell seemed to have done a good job by resolving unhappiness of the blogosphere due to its customer service.
What if its a political, racial or religious issue started by the traditional media and exploded onto the blogospere. How does an organization or company handle it? The forbidden city and starbucks and the Olympics and Carrfour casees are throughly addressed by Michael Netzley, and it is a prime example of a company caught up in a political issue. Was their response too late? How could they have used social media to react to the public uproar?
I seem a little brain dead now but it seems to me that social media is a good channel to use to resolve a crisis. Companies can cut through traditional media, which might sometimes misinterpret a message and make it look bad. Social media has the ability to allow companies to be in control of their own message they want delivered to the public, at a faster speed and at a more personal level. Of course i’m not disregarding the fact that traditional media isn’t important, it gives the company more credibility should the company have a good genuine response.
Social Media in a crisis is not a means to an end, its simply a tool that can help elevate the level of the crisis. Do you agree?
It’s important to differentiate between the “new media” in general and social media specifically. The growth of new media brought huge challenges and huge opportunities to crisis management practitioners: challenges because organisations in crisis have lost the ability to control the public discourse through mass media; opportunities because social media offer organisations in crisis more vehicles through which to influence the public discourse. An organisation in crisis that does not use the new media as a vital form of stakeholder communication stands little chance of coming out of the crisis with its credibility and reputation intact.
But organisations must adopt a more wary approach to using social media to communicate during a crisis. Social media started as a vehicle for … social communication. Some commercial and business organisations have since jumped on the bandwagon, yes; but when they use social media for pure self-promotion or marketing, it is often perceived by other users as contrary to the spirit of social media, and so the organisations’ presence may be resented and criticised. For organisation that are already active in the social media, by all means use this as another form of stakeholder communication should a crisis occur. But for organisations which have not yet ventured into social media, a crisis is a bad time to start as it would likely result only in additional criticism about its communication practices.
Haha, i just finished some engineering briefing at Yahoo! (almost dozing off), and was making a mental note to drop you a mail to ask for your response on this matter. How was you holiday?
Aye, new media truly has been a double edged sword. I think Dell was a great example of building a community around its brand through its corporate blog, it was able to resolve its “exploding notebooks” crisis quickly. Have there been examples of compnies who did use social media as pure marketing tool, and when a crisis hit, its social media channel backfired on them? That would be interesting to see, lol….
Holiday…what holiday?
I don’t doubt the power of using social media, and its influence, but we need to be very careful not to take a backwards-way-round approach to deciding how to communicate in crisis. Before any organisation decides whether to use social media to communicate with stakeholders during times of crisis, it must answer some questions.
Firstly, from the technical aspect, can the proposed mediums (I’ll use this word here so as not to be confused with “media” in a narower sense) support the potential user demand? If you are looking at a “dark site”, can the host server support possible hundreds of thousands of hits within a short period? I do know of organisations whose dark sites have crashed due to overload — all that serves to do is to make stakeholders more angry/upset and negative towards the organisation. Could a site on FB support potential user demand? How would stakeholders feel if, when desperate for information, they reach a very slow site with pages that take several minutes to load, and where they keep getting disconnected? What about site security? Could hackers easily get into the site either when it is not in use, or, worse, during times of crisis when the site is in heavy demand?
Secondly, let’s go back to the basics of planning communication. Who are the stakeholders in this particular crisis? What is the best way to reach them? What media/mediums do they use and trust? You mention the SQ006 crash. Who would the stakeholders have been — primary and secondary victims, survivors, families and friends of primary victims, employees, current and future customers, air travellers, SIA’s business partners, etc? What would be their opinions of FB? Would they see FB as a serious, reputable form of news provider? Would they feel comfortable going to FB to learn of the possible death of their loved ones? IS FB the appropriate medium to communicate with them?
In a crisis, the organisation is already viewed by stakeholders, at best, in a neutral light. What would be the impact of asking stakeholders to search for information in unfamiliar media?
Organisations need to answer all these questions before making a quick decision, “Let’s use FB for our dark site.” Ask why you are considering using social media for crisis communication. If the answer is, “Because it’s cool, using new technology, shows how up-to-date we are”– WRONG ANSWER!
How’s working/studying life?
Oh, i always had the impression you were on your holiday, haha. Juggling school and work hasn’t been easy although its been only 2 weeks, but i guess I’m getting used to it. How do people do it?
The technical aspect never crossed my mind and i can see that it would be really important. The possibility of crashing and how the speed of the website would severely affect stake holder’s response during a crisis.
I guess news providers provide a third party’s perspective to give the company a more credible image. Personal phone calls to the decease’s loved ones would only be appropriate of a company rather then letting them find out a family member died through an online medium.
Hmmm, would social media then be best used during the post crisis communications, say for a crisis which involves death. A personal video or a personal post on the corporate blog from the CEO, would social media then be more appropriate? To update on the investigations or on the progress of the crisis to concerned stakeholders?
There are certainly many forms of media that an organisation can use to communicate to stakeholders in a crisis; some of them are controlled, some are uncontrolled (remember that distinction?) As you realised even from the small exercise we did, when your organisation is in a crisis situation, there is little time to think about being creative about your communication messages. It’s generally reactive communication; you use the media everyone else is using to talk about the crisis.
But the key consideration will always come back down to: who are your stakeholders, how do they expect you to communicate with them at this time? And this may change at different phases of the crisis. In the acute crisis stage, people want to know what’s happening; the organisation has to get the facts and put them out there as quickly as possible — generally via traditional news media or company “dark site”. In the recovery stage, when the “what’s happening?” questions have been answered, the organisation’s attention will turn to rebuilding relationships. Perhaps this is the time when less traditional media can be considered, if the use of such media would seem appropriate to the stakeholders for whom the communication is tailored.
Reactive communications! I almost forgot what a mad rush it was whenever one stakeholder had a piece of news and how we had to confirm the facts and relay it to the media or other stakeholders. A good communications plan for a crisis is essential. I guess the acute stage of the crisis would really require reliable information, and if there is week or no stakeholder relationships, it would be disastrous to use a ‘dark site’.
I’ll be doing another post on crisis management which came up during a lunch discussion with my colleagues on Friday. Not a crisis happening within the company and affecting the stakeholders directly, but rather a crisis such as the Myanmar or China earthquakes and what does a company do if its using CSR. Essentially, I want to see how companies can leverage on social media to enhance its reputation in difficult times like these. or if it should?
Interesting aticle from today’s PRWeek Daily (UK)
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Relief groups turn to Twitter amid crises
Frank Washkuch 20-May-08
When a cyclone ravaged Burma earlier this month, and less than a week later when an earthquake devastated much of China’s Sichuan province, some of the first accounts of the disasters were written by bloggers and organizations on Twitter.
Although some live tweets poured in from those in China who were near enough to shoot photos and video, others came from disaster-relief nonprofit organizations.
AmeriCares used Twitter (twitter.com/americares) to disseminate information about its response in Burma, and it plans to do the same for relief efforts in China once it solidifies a response plan, says Peggy Atherlay, the nonprofit’s director of communications.
“We put up small headlines, snippets of our latest activities, so we can keep people updated on, for instance, when our first relief worker arrives in the country and when our second relief worker arrives in the country,” she says. “For China, we have plans to use Twitter updates as soon as we know our plans more concretely and have more to report.”
The Salvation Army, which has a presence in Burma, used its Twitter page (twitter.com/salvationarmy) to post updates on its efforts in the region, as well as China, as each disaster unfolded, using links to bring viewers to its home Web site, as well as to find further information.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says that although the company didn’t intend it to be a first-responder’s tool, it certainly didn’t rule it out either.
“Our offices are in the Bay Area, so even when we were prototyping Twitter, we found ourselves reaching for the mobile phones every time we felt a possible earthquake, so we had our own experiences early on realizing that in a shared event like an earthquake, being connected in real time is a huge advantage,” Stone says.
“We’re not… surprised [by the use of Twitter during the Chinese earthquake],” he adds. “Whenever there is a disaster in the world, there tends to be a spike in Twitter traffic.”
By keeping an eye on Twitter messages aggregated by Google Talk, prominent technology blogger Robert Scoble claimed his tweet on the devastating earthquake in China, which caused an estimated death toll of about 50,000, appeared before the US Geological Survey was able to report it.
“It’s amazing the news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world,” Scoble noted on his blog (www.scobleizer.com).
Though the American Red Cross doesn’t have a staff in China, it did use Twitter (twitter.com/redcross), as well as traditional media notifications, to tell victims of last year’s Southern California wildfires where to find help during the disaster, says Wendy Harman, senior associate for new media integration at the American Red Cross.
“Our first thought in creating this account [was] the people who were most affected by a disaster and distributing only the most useful information,” she says. “If you’re in [Oklahoma after a tornado] it can say, ‘A shelter is located at 154 Main Street, and it will be open until this time.’”
Although Twitter posts are generally short, the Red Cross uses the service to link viewers to sites with more information.
“You can always just link to a Web site that has more detail, and the only real downside… is that if it’s a really important piece of information, if [consumers] only have mobile phones, sometimes it is harder to click on that link,” she says. “[Twitter] is a supplemental [method]. If it doesn’t work, we just use a different method.”
The US Fund for UNICEF is providing aid in both disasters, but it did not use Twitter for disaster response. However, it has used the technology to promote Jenna Bush’s US book tour for Ana’s Story, which is based on her experience as a UNICEF intern (twitter.com/jennabush).
The fund hasn’t ruled out using the tool as a part of future response strategies, says Alisa Aydin, director of interactive marketing for the nonprofit.
Wow, that is really awesome. Twitter being a first response tool, haha, way to go! Thank god the red cross directed them to a website which has more information and is probably more accurate, it would be a PR nightmare if the PR department is gonna have to answer all the twitter speculations.
Walter Lim talks about how to leverage your brands communication to enhance your reputation through CSR efforts in a catastrophe like this.
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