Final round up - using social media for crisis communications

This is the final blogpost based on my article for Communication World.

Linking other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or traditional websites

If your organization  already has a presence on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media site it would make sense to use what I call “platform independent publishing” techniques through your crisis blog’s RSS feed.

RSS feeds can be used as a publishing system - pushing your updates to other online platforms. This way you can publish once, from your blog, and automatically syndicate this content to other sites.

Your crisis blog feed can be linked through services like Feedburner, Feed Informer or Ping quite easily. Once this is set up, every update you make about the crisis at hand will automatically show up on your Twitter channel, Facebook page or other online identities.

Speed of Twitter during a Crisis
On 15 February at 08:28 several trains were involved in an accident in Buizingen, a small village on the main train track towards Brussels, the capital of Belgium.

Later that evening the media announced 20 people had lost their lives in this terrible crash.  That morning I was driving towards the office and heard a short announcement on the radio about “a possible train accident”.

As I live only three kilometers away from Buizingen I checked Twitter and searched for updates containing the word “buizingen”.

At 8:38 I found an update with pictures of what happened  - making it clear that people died in the crash - while it took traditional media more than half an hour to communicate information about “possible injuries”. (Picture by @cdrik9)

Using Social Media after a Crisis

Once a crisis is “over” it is crucial to keep communications channels open. A lot of organizations underestimate the aftermath and tend to quickly return to what they consider "business as usual".

Although this makes sense from an operational point of view and even from a crisis management perspective, it is crucial for communication professionals to manage the “post-crisis” communications as well. Social media can play a role in this respect.

Social media by their nature tend to gather people around a certain topic or event; this is even more true during times of crisis. The social media tools you have used during the crisis could become a platform for transparent ongoing communications. In some cases an organization can even turn its own platform into a service to the community of its constituents.

One example of such an open social media driven crisis platform is Ushahidi.

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

The platform was developed in 2008 to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout that year. Today the platform is open source and free for all to use and tailor to their needs.

I can see a company adapting this platform into an ongoing communications and awareness tool, using it as an advanced alert post, gathering information on potential risks and integrating it into its ongoing crisis planning.

In Conclusion

Social media are here to stay and are part of our daily lives. Traditional media, marketeers and more and more communications professionals are embracing them. Social media make everyone with an internet connection a potential global communicator - including during a crisis situation.

The first step is to listen to these online conversations and to learn how to transparently engage with your online influencers. By trying out and using these tools you will quickly see how to integrate them into your crisis planning.

Although the ultimate goal is never to have to use them, it is definitely the right moment to start adding them to your crisis communications mix.

Article originally published in Communication Magazine - Author: Philippe Borremans - Date: July 1, 2010

PS: Interested in more ? Check out the e-learning page on this blog or let me know if you would like to test an enterprise grade online monitoring tool for free (no strings attached) for 2 weeks.

PR Agencies in Belgium & their RSS feeds - edition 2009.

It is that time of the year again where I check about 29 Belgium based PR agencies - or rather their websites - on the use of RSS feeds.

Again, this is nothing scientific; I just go to the website in question, see if an RSS feed is clearly active, clearly visible and tick off a list.

(This is edition N°5 - I started keeping track in 2005.)

Why bother you might ask...

Well, I do think that if you're in the "content business", the "external communications business", the "conversation business" then you need to have an automated feed that syndicates your content - or the content of your clients - to the online world.

As Public Relations professional you need to understand the full potential of really simple syndication and apply it to your website.

This year I also listed if the agencies in question had a clearly linked blog of their own... In some cases I had to search a bit further than the home page but when this is the case it is also indicated in the list.

Now, here are the top level results:

• from the 29 Belgium based PR agencies listed only 8 had an active RSS feed on their website.
• from the same list, the same number of agencies - 8 - have a clearly linked blog.

Some remarkable agencies:

• Outsource, a former client, has completely switched from "classic website" to a full blogging platform.
• RCA Group has no RSS feed on their website but do have a blog with RSS.
• Porter Novelli, a former employer, has a new blog but it is not linked to their website.

Again this year, I am not impressed...

While some agencies really do their best to get with social media and apply it to their day to day work, most of them seem never to have heard of RSS or any other change in online communications recently.

Even when they use RSS, most agencies do not explain what it is or link their feed to an email newsletter.

In most cases you really have to look for a way to subscribe to their content... Which to me is a bit of a contradiction for a PR agency.

If you want to know how you could use RSS, feel free to search my blog for several articles or at least read this one.

You can download the full list here (opens a PDF) and if you're not on the list, or if I oversaw something, please let me know.

As I said, this is nothing scientific, not designed to be, but a simple check up once a year...