[crisis communications 2012: social media …...2012 a continuity insights special report [crisis...

2012

A Continuity Insights Special Report

[CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS 2012: SOCIAL MEDIA & NOTIFICATION SYSTEMS] A survey of more than 250 organizations designed to determine how social media platforms are being used and the perceived effectiveness of each platform, the functionality of notification systems and mobile applications, and the content of crisis communication plans.

Copyright © 2012 Continuity Insights 1

Table Of Contents Executive Summary................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Part 1: Adoption, Reach & Target Audience Of Social Media................................................................................................................. 6 Part 2: Notification System Adoption, Functionality & Protocols ........................................................................................................ 18 Part 3: Mobile Devices & Applications.................................................................................................................................................. 22 Part 4: Perceived Effectiveness............................................................................................................................................................. 25 Part 5: Crowdsourcing........................................................................................................................................................................... 28 Part 6: Documented Plans .................................................................................................................................................................... 30 More Information ................................................................................................................................................................................. 32


Executive Summary

Introduction Continuity Insights’ first in‐depth survey for 2012 looks at the growing use of social media as a crisis communication tool. Respondents from over 250 organizations were asked to provide data about their organization’s social media accounts and usage, which was then used to indicate the reach and target audience — key factors when using social media in a crisis. Before the rise of social media, notification systems were one of the only ways to effectively disseminate information during a crisis. As such, the survey includes information about the use and functionality of respondent’s notification systems. We then asked respondents to rate the perceived effectiveness of the three main social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — and their own notification system in getting information out to employees, customers and the public during a crisis. The data are compelling, clearly showing a lack of confidence in social media’s reach during a crisis. While most people think about social media as a way to push out information, it is also a powerful “crowdsourcing” tool, capable of turning the public into sources of information. This idea goes against the traditional top‐down approach to disaster response and crisis communications, but the results show many plan to use social media in exactly this way. Lastly, respondents provided information about their documented crisis communication plans and whether they address the use of social media during a crisis.


Key Findings

• 52% plan to use social media to gather information during an event or crisis.

• 66% use a notification system, of which 77% believe that the system will be very useful or invaluable in getting messages out to employees during an event or crisis. In contrast, respondents did not generally think Facebook (31%), Twitter (33%) and YouTube (14%) would be a Very useful or Invaluable way to push information out to the public, customers and employees during a crisis.

• 54% address the use of social media in their documented crisis communication plans.

• 32% of organizations use social media monitoring tools.

• 24% use mobile applications that incorporate business continuity/crisis communication plans or notification capabilities. For these applications, BlackBerry was the most widely supported device (84%), followed by iPhone/iPad (62%), Android (56%) and Windows Mobile (30%).

Conclusions & Recommendations Social media is being embraced as a source of information during a crisis, but is not yet considered a reliable medium by which information can be pushed out. As a result, traditional notification tools remain the preferred method for reaching employees during a crisis. The results from this survey can be used to benchmark your own organization’s use of social media and isolate areas for further improvement. In addition:

• It is vital that all organizations develop and document a social media strategy. A good starting point is the POST method: http://www.continuityinsights.com/articles/2012/02/intelligence‐based‐business‐continuity‐part‐1‐post‐method

http://www.continuityinsights.com/articles/2012/02/intelligence-based-business-continuity-part-1-post-method


• The organization‐wide use of social media requires business continuity and disaster recovery professionals engage with other business units in order to achieve a holistic social media strategy for the entire organization. Many marketing and communications departments, for example, already have some social media guidelines in place.

• As with any targeted message, it is important to know who your message is reaching and to customize the information for

that audience. With social media, the platform often determines the audience.

• Social media monitoring tools help to filter the large volume of data generated on social media during a crisis.

There is a significant lack of understanding by social media users that monitoring must be equal in scale to adoption, and that monitoring goes beyond marketing analysis; it can be used to track brand and company threat trends, competitor information, employee use and misuse, brand detractor attacks, and a variety of new product development and service enhancement initiatives via customer engagement. Companies that have adopted social media without a clear monitoring plan are not truly using social media. — James W. Satterfield, President & CEO, Firestorm


Respondent Profile Survey respondents comprise professionals from business continuity, disaster recovery, IT and risk‐related backgrounds. Prominent job titles include:

• BC Manager • BC Analyst • DR Coordinator • CIO/CAO/VP • IT/BC Consultant • Risk Manager • Security Officer • Supply Chain Officer • Cybersecurity Specialist

LinkedIn and Facebook are widely used by respondents for personal and networking purposes. Note that Twitter is not widely used for personal purposes.


Part 1: Adoption, Reach & Target Audience Of Social Media

Adoption: Facebook Over half (57%) of the organizations surveyed use a public corporate Facebook page.


Adoption: Twitter Less than half (44%) of organizations use a corporate Twitter account. It’s also notable that nearly one‐quarter of respondents (23%) are not sure if their organization uses a Twitter account.


Adoption: YouTube As expected, the number of organizations using YouTube is much smaller at 22%.


Reach: Facebook Over two‐thirds (68%) of organizations have over 500 likes on their corporate Facebook page. Close to one‐quarter (22%) have over 10,000 Facebook likes.


Reach: Twitter The size of Twitter networks is somewhat smaller, with only 55% of organizations having over 500 followers.


Reach: YouTube Less than half (49%) of organizations have over 500 YouTube subscribers. Nearly 15% or organizations have an extensive reach with over 10,000 subscribers, but just under one‐third (30%) have fewer than 100 subscribers.


Engagement: Facebook To get an indication of the level of social media engagement, organizations were asked how frequently they post content to their social media pages. Just under half (47%) of organizations post to their Facebook page on a daily basis.


Engagement: Twitter Similarly, 47% of organizations post to their Twitter account on a daily basis.


Engagement: YouTube Just over 10% of organizations post to their YouTube account on a daily basis. This is considerably lower than Facebook and Twitter due to the amount of effort required to shoot and edit a video compared with posting text or a link.


Target Audience Respondents’ intended audience when posting to Facebook is most often the public (71%), followed by customers (61%) and employees (45%). The same pattern is seen in Twitter and YouTube. For the responses collected in the “Other” field, a number of respondents indicated their target audience to be potential employees and customers. Apart from the obvious crisis communications applications of social media, some are using it for important business functions such as recruiting and prospecting.


Crossover This Venn diagram shows that only a small portion of organizations are using all three of the social media platforms included in this survey.


Internal Social Media Tools Less than one‐quarter (22%) of organizations use internal social media tools to communicate with employees. Many respondents noted that SharePoint is used to communicate with employees internally.


Part 2: Notification System Adoption, Functionality & Protocols

Adoption Nearly two‐thirds (66%) of organizations use a notification system. In 2008, Continuity Insights conducted an Emergency Notification & Communication survey. The percentage of respondents with, or in the process of implementing, a notification system has not changed — the 2008 figure was also 66%.


Channels Email (91%), phone (83%) and SMS (73%) are by far the most common channels for notification message deployment.


Sophistication Over 70% of the organizations with notification systems are able to use two‐way communications to gather information from message recipients.


Protocols & Templates Over 82% of the organizations with notification systems have documented protocols for message content and deployment. Additionally, over 75% use templates for notification messages.


Part 3: Mobile Devices & Applications

Mobile Devices During a crisis, mobile devices and applications allow crisis response team members to gather and send information while away from their desks. There are now several mobile applications available that incorporate business continuity and/or crisis plans with notification functionality, maps and contact lists. Less than one‐quarter (24%) currently use these types of mobile applications.


Phone Modality Over 41% of the business continuity‐related mobile applications used by respondents utilize hardware‐specific modalities (functions) in order to send or receive information. The most common example of phone modality is the BlackBerry PIN/Messenger function, which allows BlackBerry users to send other BlackBerry users messages at no cost.


Operating System Support For those using business continuity‐related mobile applications, support for the BlackBerry operating system (OS) is widespread (84%); however, support for iOS (iPhone/iPad) (62%) and Android (56%) is expected to grow as they expand into the enterprise market.


Part 4: Perceived Effectiveness Less than one‐third (31%) of respondents consider Facebook to be a Very useful or Invaluable way to push information out during a crisis. Twitter scored slightly higher with 33%.


While YouTube was considered an even less effective way to push information out during a crisis (14% thought it would be Very useful or Invaluable), over three‐quarters (76%) felt that a notification system is a Very useful or Invaluable way to reach employees during a crisis.


Reach ≠ Confidence When the results were filtered to show only those respondents with a large social media network reach (10,000+ Facebook likes, etc.), the level of confidence (perceived effectiveness) in social media as a tool to push information out during a crisis varied significantly. That is, there is no correlation between the reach (size) of social networks and the perceived effectiveness.

"User experiences are mostly rooted in how the respective user has employed social media in their personal lives. Folks whose organizations are blessed with lots of followers or likes may have been disappointed by the fact that despite their organization’s social media presence responding to crises has been challenging and not always successful. The reason is that it takes much more than a large number of external users to stage a successful crisis response."

— Oliver Schmidt, Managing Partner, C4CS


Part 5: Crowdsourcing Over half of respondents plan to use social media to gather information during a crisis. This can include both official sources and members of the public who voluntarily post potentially useful information.


Social Media Monitoring Gathering and efficiently processing information from social media during a crisis requires a tool to filter and analyze the data. There are a number of free and paid social media monitoring tools. The two most popular are free — TweetDeck and HootSuite — followed by the paid service Radian6. Another popular option indicated in the “Other” field is Google, presumably for the free Google Alerts service.


Part 6: Documented Plans A vast majority (91%) of organizations have a documented crisis communications plan, either as a stand‐alone document or as part of a larger document. Plans are most often updated on a yearly basis (39%) and cater for a range of incidents including winter weather events (71%) and tornadoes (64%). Many responses in the “Other” field indicate an “all‐hazards” approach to crisis planning.


Over half (54%) of respondents indicated social media is addressed in their organization’s documented crisis communications plans. However, post‐survey interviews revealed that the use of social media is not generally addressed in the context of a crisis. The fact that social media is used by so many parts of an organization requires a more holistic, cross‐functional and collaborative approach.

"Collectively, various teams are continuously working to ensure social media is not a separate thought-process for the company. It is simply another communication vehicle that is considered across communication processes — crisis or not. It does take work and collaboration to establish effective and diverse social media processes and, depending on a company’s cultures, it is easy to ignore it or use it in isolated ways." — Rick Werth, Director, Physical Security & Enterprise Business Continuity — Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield


More Information Questions can be directed to Luke Simpson, Editor, at [email protected]. For Continuity Insights resources, including conferences, webinars, feature articles, industry news and blogs, go to www.continuityinsights.com. To subscribe to the weekly CI Bulletin e‐newsletter, go to http://subscribe.advantagemedia.com/ci/landing.aspx?cmpid=navlink. For more information on the 2012 Continuity Insights Management Conference, April 16‐18, 2012 in Scottsdale, Arizona, where we will be conducting an industry‐first Social Media Tabletop Exercise, go to www.continuityinsights.com/scottsdale.

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[crisis communications 2012: social media …...2012 a continuity insights special report [crisis...

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