PR crisis management in the ‘Twitter Age’

“In the Twitter age” is a term I heard this past week from a slightly frustrated public relations professional talking about how he’s been forced to modify his crisis management plan.

And change he must. The best-laid crisis management plan will quickly unravel when information – true, untrue or even malicious – starts spreading on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

So how do PR professionals get from “being there” in social media to modifying their crisis management plan in the “Twitter age”?

Engagement: More than ever it’s important that solid social relationships are being built before a crisis breaks. Doing the basics on social platforms is a start; being fully engaged with social audiences will help save your reputation at a time of crisis.

Resources: If you don’t have someone on social media fulltime then you need to have them on it most of the time. Look at how your organization currently spends time. How much effort is still going into maintaining relationships with a few traditional media types? The ratio of time devoted to traditional media vs. social media needs to be flipped … even if slowly at first.

Listening: From basic free tools such as Google Alerts to paid services such as Alterian’s SM2 or Radian6 you can’t afford to NOT be monitoring conversations in social media around your products, your organization and your key people. You don’t know what you’re missing – literally. And that should be a very frightening prospect.

Black pages: If your news web pages don’t have “black pages” (pages designed to go live in response to various issues) you need to prepare them now. Every organization can predict certain types of issues that are likely to arise. Having a landing page that answers some likely first questions and that can go up on your website at a moment’s notice is smart planning.

First responders: You’ve already assigned responsibilities during a crisis, but whose job is it to manage social media messages and to respond to any inaccurate messaging? What is on that person’s checklist? Not responding is no longer an option … if it ever was. In the social world silence can equal acknowledgement that things are bad. Your social media first responder needs to understand this and the critical role they are playing in social messaging.

Prioritizing: Which social media platforms need the most attention? Without a doubt Twitter is an instant news service and deserves the most attention. Don’t be fooled by the numbers of Twitter users in your organization, your industry or your community. Twitter users are some of the most-educated, most-active and, possibly worst for you in a crisis, most-likely to spread what they see on Twitter via word-of-mouth. In other words their broad influence should be of great concern. Facebook is also a default communication platform by people who are concerned. Be sure to message there too and note that once the heat of the moment dies down the conversation around the crisis will likely linger longer on Facebook.

Follow-up: Once the crisis has passed don’t ignore social media. Find a way to post a reassuring video message from the CEO on YouTube or have someone in authority blog about the event and its successful outcome … load it up with photographs. Be sure to reach out to those who were most active during the crisis to alert them to this follow-up.

Can PR professionals control messaging on social media platforms during a crisis? No. But they can be there, be engaged and can quickly tamp down the small sparks of inaccuracy before they become damaging firestorms of bad information. Social media is changing the PR professionals’ job description, what else about crisis management did I leave out?

Possibly related posts:
10 Ideas to Help Business Navigate Social Media
Just How Big is Social Media?

The Social Media Release

Best Practices and Some Examples

The Social Media Release – also called the Social Media Press Release and Social Media News Release – has rapidly become the way for anyone trying to “get the word out” to provide all the resources necessary for anyone from citizen-customer to journalist to find the information they want (in the format they like it).

So, what is a Social Media Release? In a nutshell it is a page, usually a Web page, that collects words, images, audio, video, links, social bookmarks and more around the topic you care about. And by “you” we mean both the person spreading the word and the person looking for information.

Background: In a 2006 post titled Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die! blogger Tom Foremski tapped into a broad media sentiment that the days of the standard old-school press release needed to end. His main points: Cut out the spin and provide information in many different formats

It was then that Todd Defren of Boston’s Shift Communications suggested a better way: the Social Media Press Release – a more conversational and useful collection of information and supporting materials. He offered up a Social Media Press Release template

This was followed on the blog Conversation Marketing by Ian Lurie wondering about the lack of an HTML version and so he made one. You can preview Lurie’s Social Media Release or download the HTML as a Zip file.

10 Must-Haves in a Social Media Release

Contacts: Information – front and center – on how to reach the author of the release, the key person quoted in the release and the online newsroom of the releasing organization.

Words: A brief description of the point you are trying to make (with no spin) and why any reader might care to check out all of your wonderful, related content. Aim for 250 to 750 words – no more. Be sure to optimize for the search engines by including one or more of your keyword phrases.

Images:That are linked to from Flickr or some other online resource where the entire album is available.

Audio: Saved as a podcast on iTunes or saved on your server/Web site as a common-format audio file that is linked to from the release.

Video: Which is hosted at YouTube allowing consumers to watch it directly and journalists to grab the embed code for possible inclusion on their own web sites.

Print It/Email It buttons: These are no longer “nice touches,” but are absolutely expected.

”Share This Page” buttons: These invite visitors to share your content with others through social bookmarking and social media sites … and makes it very easy to do. For example clicking on the Twitter button opens a Twitter window asking the user to sign in to their account and pre-fills the Status Box with a short message about your content and shortened URL leading right to it. Other buttons should cover the major Social Media information sharing sites likely to be used by your target audiences.

Links: Be sure to include links everywhere. The more links you have to targeted and relevant information, the company’s principals and the company home page the more interaction you encourage. This also doesn’t hurt your Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, efforts either.

Comments box: Make it easy for anyone to talk back to you. No-registration-needed comments fields are best as even a simple registration process will deter many from taking the time to leave a comment. And you do want to hear from everybody and anybody. A name and an email address is all you need ask for.

Invitation to sign up for notifications: Invite anyone to share their email to be alerted to future Social Media Releases.


Some examples of good Social Media Releases (SMR):

- Ford’s 2008 Ford Focus release

- Coca-Cola’s Virtual Thirst competition for Second Life release

- Cincom’s announcement that its Smalltalk software programming language had won the Dynamic Language Shootout competition



Related Content:
Social Media and Public Relations

5 Steps Before Jumping Into Social Media

Thinking before you jump will save you from ending up ‘all wet’

It seems everyone can’t wait to jump into Social Media. And for business this may present a real problem.

Think of Social Media as a giant swimming pool. Now if you have a simple goal of just getting wet, then by all means jump in.

But if you have some real goals and want a return on your time in Social Media you might want to have a plan.

Here’s a checklist of 10 Things To Consider Before You Jump into Social Media:

1. Do you have the support of all the stakeholders? Seems simple, but without buy-in from employees all the way up to the CEO and shareholders you may find yourself spending more time explaining and defending rather than engaging in Social Media. If you get commitments of time and money upfront you can focus on getting off to a good start.

2. Do you have clearly defined goals? Social Media can be a lot of different things to a lot of different users, but one thing it can’t be: A miracle worker. Muddled and confused presences in Social Media will look like everyone behind them does not know who they are and why they are there. Do you, for example, know where your target audience hangs out in Social Media? Take the time to do the research and create a plan (with benchmarks to measure results).

3. Do you know what tools will best suit your purpose? Blogs may make sense if you have someone who is a good writer and has the interest in maintaining the effort. Facebook and Twitter presences could help grow the audience or how about LinkedIn profile where you share something about your business and show off your employees and their skills? The point is: Not all tools make sense for all situations.

4. Do you have the knowledge and skill to do this effectively? The good news: Your organization may collectively “know more than it knows.” In other words there may be people on board who know different aspects of Social Media. Great! But if not then you’ll need to hire some help. You also need to consider who will maintain the effort and who will oversee it.

5. Do you understand the risks? These run the gamut from “What happens if we don’t engage in Social Media?” to “What happens if something goes wrong in Social Media - how will we react?” Will your existing policies on electronic communications be adequate to cover employees and others using Social Media tools? Ask lots of questions.

If any of these questions about Social Media efforts give you cause to pause then you may need to turn to a professional – someone who can guide the process for you: from research and planning to training, implementation and measuring success.

Resources:

Peter Kim writing for Mashable.com on The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan

Cory Treffiletti writing the blog Online Spin for MediaPost on The Problem with Planning Social Media (No Problem)

Social Media Academy is an education and research institute whose graduates work in many aspects of Social Media

For some national “heavy hitters” in Social Media see ReadWriteWeb’s postSeven Social Media Consultants That Deliver Tangible Value


Previous Posts
10 Commandments for Social Media
5 strategies to get the Boss into Social Media
Social Media Expertise Is Hard To Find
Social Media disasters

The Twitter Juggernaut

Social Media’s fastest growing platform won’t slow down

Twitter continues to tweet up a storm and seems unstoppable in its drive to be the No. 1 Social Media platform.

The latest evidence comes in a poll on LinkedIn that rated Twitter more important to business than LinkedIn! This in a time when LinkedIn is widely considered to be “The Social Media network for business.”

In his excellent summary of the survey, “Poll: Business People Say Twitter More Important Than LinkedIn” Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb points out that the poll question may have been tilted against LinkedIn. As asked in the poll, the question was: “What is the most important new platform for brands to master?" And he quibbles that if the question had been "what do you prefer" that LinkedIn would have fared better. Nonetheless Twitter did come out on top in a poll on LinkedIn.

And if you’re looking for more evidence that Twitter will be the Social Media App of the Year in 2009 and likely the No. 1 Social Media platform in 2010 (if not sooner), here's the latest:

- Twitter is the fastest-growing major website in the U.S., according to USA Today in its May 25 story Twitter has millions tweeting in public communication service. It had 17 million registered users in the U.S. in April — up 3,000% from a year ago, according to market researcher ComScore

- Twitter founder Evan Williams points out that in a single year Twitter has gone from 1.6 million to 32.1 million users. In a CNBC interview Twitter's growth 'just getting started he says: "We think we can grow a long term sustainable valuable business here, and we're just getting started."

- A Squidoo lens called Twitterapps lists 275 Twitter applications and believes it does not have anywhere near all of them covered.

- When an old school media publication such as Time magazine devotes space to 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business you know the Twitterverse has reached into every corner of our existence.

And on the subject of Twitter’s universal reach Brian Solis has posted an excellent visualization of the Twitterverse on his blog PR 2.0. I highly recommend it.

Whether Twitter is the No. 1 Social Media platform now or later, one thing is certain its rapid growth and adoption for all kinds of purposes will not slow anytime soon.

Related posts
Twetiquette: 10 basics for Twitter politeness
What Twitter isn’t

Communications Schools and Teaching Social Media

Which communications schools are teaching Social Media integration?

The use of Social Media continues to explode.

News organizations, advertising agencies, marketing firms and public relations businesses are working mightily to add Social Media to their arsenal of weapons and tactics for reaching the unwashed masses.

And yet universities in the United States seem slow to grasp the significance of the changes in the world of communications.

A Google search on the terms “social media” and “communications school” brings a little over 900 results. But less than a half dozen of these links take you to a four-year college that teaches classes in Social Media. None offers a four-year degree in a subject area such as Social Media and Public Communications.

While there are very good schools offering one-off classes and add-on labs it's fair to say that generally American academia has not been sufficiently impressed by Social Media to offer in-depth academic course work in its various elements.

A notable exception is American University’s Center for Social Media. With its mantra of “Helping people make media that matters” and a mission to “investigate, showcase and set standards for socially engaged media-making” it is a shining example of what a higher-learning institution can do. And yet …

Somehow, it seems to me, Social Media will only have “made it” when classes such as “Twitter 101: How Twitter Fits Into the Public Communications Spectrum” and “Twitter 201: Using Twitter to Add Meaning and Value to Public Communications” are among those in a four-year curriculum in Social Media.

Clearly American academia (and the people who fund it) have yet to grasp the colossal change going on in Public Communications. Still content to teach “push” media such as television, radio, newspaper and magazine, they may offer one class on the “new Social Media” here or there.

Ironically many students graduating from communications schools in the next few weeks will know more about Social Media than their professors – a lot more – and they will have learned it on their own.

As they look for jobs in real world media it’s a very safe bet their knowledge and abilities with Social Media will set them apart from those who simply stuck to the curriculum.

When will the majority of communications schools wake up?