Social media in a crisis

Over the weekend, you probably heard about the crisis with the Eurostar. It brought into a very public light the role that social media plays in our lives. Unfortunately (bizarrely) a lot of the comments on Twitter or blogs became about the London-based conversation agency ‘We Are Social’ as some saw it as an opportunity to criticise them and their handling of the situation. This seemed completely illogical to me and from what I can see (and I know a few of them personally) the agency did everything they could, given the barriers they were up against. They went above and beyond and hats off to them for that. Thankfully there were some insightful posts that gave a balanced view of the situation, not least from We Are Social themselves. But this is not a post about We are Social. I want to talk about what the conversations at the weekend should have been about, which is the role of social media in a crisis.

If this weekend showed us anything, it’s that social media shouldn’t just be an add-on to existing communications if you have a bit of leftover budget. It needs to be an integral part of your communication strategy, both internally and externally. It’s understandable that many brands want to test the waters with a campaign-led approach, but it ultimately ignores the very nature of social media. The role of social media in a crisis should prove that. If you’re not lucky enough to have an agency that’s willing to step in outside of their remit, then you’re going to have a fairly big problem on your hands.

Some critics will question the need to pay attention to social media in a crisis, suggesting that it’s worth allocating your time on actually fixing the problem. But conversation and information, is key. The fact is that now you have to follow where the conversation is happening. There were people tweeting their experiences on the Eurostar incident, so if the conversation is already happening on Twitter, you need to find a way to get information through that channel. If you don’t, all you have is speculation and confusion and matters can very quickly get worse. The role of social media in a crisis should not be underestimated and this is something that brands need to sit up and take notice of. Ignoring social media is no longer an option.

Crises also show the importance of social media (or your social media agency) acting across different departments internally, not just marketing and PR. If your social media team is closely aligned to customer care, product development etc.. then you will have developed a clearly streamlined communication process, without having to be fed information through the traditional comms departments. Social media is more immediate and real-time than traditional  channels so you need to act quicker and get information faster. What this also exposes, and which many of the critics probably wouldn’t have considered, is the legalities involved in a crisis. When it comes to situations like that, sending a quick tweet or putting up a message on a Facebook page isn’t the sum of what you see on the page. It is the culmination of many different internal processes that need to be adhered to. I’ve been involved in a situation with a client when I’ve sat in their offices to manage social media channels in a high-pressured situation. As much as I could hear what was going on around me, I also knew there was approval that I had to wait for before making a move.

Organisations need to change

This is clearly at odds with how social media works. It shows us that social media needs to impact internal communication, to affect how you can handle external channels, particularly in a crisis. Brands and agencies need to better plan how social media can work in a crisis and how traditional barriers and processes can be worked around or removed to reflect our NOW society. Crisis comms is a well practiced area of PR. Indeed, a PRs job is often about keeping their client out of the headlines, rather than the other way around. But it’s something we’re only just starting to encounter with these new social channels. It is evident that the need for a real-time monitoring service and reputation management process is now a must-have, not just a luxury.

There are serious circumstances to consider to. Without the presence of official responses, you can often get inaccurate information and the implications of this have been expertly discussed by Paul Carr in his article on citizen journalism. In lieu of official channels communicating the facts, you have a tangle of real-time individual updates and comments that can, unfortunately, sometimes exacerbate the situation. Now I’m not saying that citizen journalism is unequivocally a bad thing, but it does need a better system in place. Social media is great for providing a perspective on a situation, we’ve seen amazing examples such as the Mumbai attacks, for this. But what it doesn’t do is provide us with the answers.

There is a big difference between information and opinion. Why did something happen? How many are injured? What’s being done about it?  A project that could be a game-changer in this respect is Swift River. Swift River is a development from a Twitter project that used crowd-sourcing to calculate waiting times in poll stations. It is now primarily concerned with crisis situations. It works on a system of administrators and authority. Crucially, if you create an instance (which works in an RSS system) you can then add or delete sources of information. There is someone there who is manually approving a source, determining its accuracy and authority. Swift River will also attempt to use algorithms to determine authority and the relevance of links. It is certainly one to watch.

So what can you learn from this?

To come back to the original point, to act in a crisis is to act quickly. Something which social media is perfectly positioned to do, but which internal processes are not so readily set up for. Some brands are showing that they understand the importance of social media in a crisis. Just today there was a fire in the Guinness Storehouse and they swiftly updated their Facebook page, which sparked a flurry of comments and interactions. The conversation happened in social media, but through an official channel.

If brands and agencies learn anything from the Eurostar incident, it’s that social media needs to have a presence and a process at many levels of an organisation. You need to have a crisis plan in place that includes social media from the outset, not just as an afterthought. And you need to pay someone either internally or externally to do this on an ongoing basis and not just hope they’ll give up their weekend to help you out with things like this, hours after the initial crisis