the proliferation of social media

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Social media is one of the most rapidly growing forms of communication and information exchange. In this presentation we will examine the role of social media networking in crisis communication. As a result of this presentation you should have an increased awareness of the pervasiveness of social media in contributing to crises, the current status of social media in organizations, and how it can be used to monitor and mitigate crises.1The proliferation of social media

Just in case you havent noticed, social media is pervading our lives and work at a phenomenal rate. The rate is only matched by the variety of ways in which social media has mutated. These include virtual worlds where people can meet and interact in 3D environments. People can post, share, publish, discuss, promote, advertise, and livecast just about anything they can think of. At the same time that this channel and information overload occurs, people seem to be less critical in their thinking or concerns about checking sources and accuracy of information. Consequently, information, however accurate or inaccurate, can go viral in a matter of minutes and hours. While some of it may be entertaining and irrelevant, other information can start rumors, slander products, and create doubt about people, products, services, and organizations. Lets first look at the pervasiveness of social media.2

There are several popular platforms used for staging social media. The most popular include facebook, youtube, twitter, linkedIn, foursquare, and flickr. Take a moment to examine the percent and millions of people who are active on each of these media.3

In addition to individual people, businesses are catching the wave in social media. 35% of small businesses have a presence on Facebook. Of those who use social media, nearly 70% routinely update their business profiles, and about 60% use it to attract new customers and actively build their sites. However, only about 40 percent of those attend to customer feedback in those social networks. 4

Social networking provides access and exposure to an immense global population. For example, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world! Although nearly 80% of business executives believe that social media is critical for business success, only about half or less use it. When we are considering crisis management, why would they not consider the monitoring and use of social media?5

Word of Mouth before and afterCrisis communication networks Nature article

Heres why its important. Many people still think of how word of mouth communication used to work where one person would tell another, and that person would tell another, and so on. Perhaps eventually this would be picked up by the media, and professional journalists would check the sources, apply critical thinking, and decide whether it was true and newsworthy. Today, when an event happens, it is just as likely that someone is taking real-time video and uploading it as it occurs, to immediately be spread around the world.6

http://www.mymarketing.net/index.php?art_id=1637&sez_id=2&sez=MANAGEMENT&versione=ingleseBad news travels fast

When a crisis hits, its spread has been described as viral in the sense of spreading like a pandemic by a network of connected news sources. Within 24 hours or sooner it has likely hit all the formal and informal networks, and people already are forming impressions of what they have heard however accurate or inaccurate it is.7

How media information goes viral http://www.708media.com/social-media-marketing/why-your-business-should-be-using-social-media/

Take a moment and examine how information goes viral. Start with the content created at the top center, and follow the several branches that feed into each other. Also notice the huge numbers of people who are exposed to the information at each point.8

Digital crisis Communications Study

In a study, 826 business executives and managers were surveyed and interviewed in 2011. Over three quarters of them believe that they will experience a crisis within the year, and half think it will occur in cyberspace. 9


The role of social media pressure on a company is acknowledged, and over 80% of executives believe it is increasing. In addition, social media involvement makes crises more difficult to manage, it increases costs, it conceals the influencers. However, over half also believe that social media makes it easier to recover from crises.10

A social media crisis is a crisis issue that arises in or is amplified by social media, and results in negative mainstream media coverage, a change in business process, or financial loss

Crises can also be initiated in social media, or can exacerbate and amplify situations that already exist. This can result in even more mainstream coverage that has adverse impact on businesses. Notice in this figure that social media crises have been increasing since about 2006 a fairly recent phenomena.11


As much as social media is becoming recognized as important in a crisis, nearly half do not know how to monitor such channels nor do they have an adequate understanding of how to identify or engage stakeholders.12


More specifically, the weak points in social media response are becoming more apparent with exposures of several prominent crises. The biggest issues include inability to respond using the new media, inability to respond rapidly, dealing with excessive negative commentary, and lack of team expertise in media. Lesser factors include poorly integrated old and new media platforms, employee undermining, and not using external experts.13

Other reasons for social media crises have been identified. Given the high number of people in social media who make complaints about products or services, it should not be surprising that exposure of poor customer experiences leads the list. Review the other reasons noted here. In case you are not familiar with the term, astroturfing refers to a campaign advocating for a political, corporate, or organizational cause but disguised as a grassroots movement. Its important to recognize that causes can be benign or malicious, internal or external, local or global. This diversity requires a lot of consideration in strategic planning and developing a crisis monitoring and response plan.14

social media crises resulting in significant change by the companiescrises resulting in a change (of some lesser magnitude) by the companiescrises impacting the short-term finances of companies

As a result of ignoring or insufficiently responding to social media, organizations can be adversely impacted. Over a 10 year period ,social media crises showed that a majority (52%) actually led to an organization making a significant change in its operations or image. About 40% resulted in a lesser change, while only 3% led to short term financial changes. These impacts make social media crises a key area to monitor and consider in strategic and day to day planning.15

Social media crises on the rise

Companies who experienced a social media crisis that resulted in adverse effects showed several indications of insufficient readiness. Lacking education of internal employees topped the list people simply were not knowledgeable and were not prepared. In addition, professional staff were less prepared, there was no triage plan, and policies were not in place.16

Some industries are more affected by social media crises than others. Take a moment to review the various industries that were affected over the period of 2001-2011. Notice too, that very few industries can completely avoid such risk.17

Nearly all social media platforms are venues where crises can occur, with all of them offering channels for potential viral problems. Nearly all share about a fifth of the crisis origins, and together comprise about 96%.18

The widespread use of social media (e.g., blogging, websites, texting, etc.) enables rapid adverse reactions among diverse groups to business crises.The same media enables businesses to monitor such rumors and information, identify information channels, and respond to crisesThe use of social media requires understanding, strategy, planning and testingYet a study by Herder and Ethos Business Law (2009) found 51% of senior managers, marketing and HR executives fear social media could be detrimental to employee productivity, and almost half believe that it could damage company reputation.Only 13% of companies have included social media in their crisis management plans!Social media for crisis management?

In summary, social media is ubiquitous, can be used for benefits such as marketing, but also involves the risk of rapid viral adverse information. This requires strong organizational understanding of social media, how to use it, and respond to crises. Yet, in spite of frequent stories of crises, many managers and executives have reservations and too few companies have sufficient plans for such events. Although the specific estimates may vary by study, very few companies include social media in their crisis plans.19Social Media Crisis Management

So what can be done about it. By now it is clear that ignoring the problem is not a viable plan, and such neglect can merely increase risk and escalation. In the following slides we will examine what organizations can do to increase awareness, plan for and respond more effectively to social media crises.20

http://ecommercesnews.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/study-social-media-marketing-reduces-reputation-crisis-costs-by-33/

Many organizations first consider the cost of involvement in social media risk mitigation, so it can be helpful to examine what these costs are. This figure presents an example of such an estimate. Obviously these estimates will vary by type of crisis and organization, but the comparison between estimated damages versus cost of mitigation helps make the argument.21Social Media Monitoring

Monitoring social media comments about the industry, organization, suppliers, its people, products and services is an important step in developing an early warning system. A segment of the IT department should be designated for this function, and there should be clear resources to support the identification of sources, collection, processing and analysis of information, and making it available to decision makers. Such information should be available realtime 24/7 since it is clear in previous slides how rapidly information can go viral.22

Brand Monitoringhttp://www.branded3.com/services/analytics-tracking/brand-monitoring/

One common area of monitoring involves brand impression comments. This slide shows a sample of monitoring in three sources over time. Such profiles make it easy to see when there is deviation in the frequency or tone of conversation. Parameters can be established so that automatic alerts are received when levels deviate significantly.23

Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business

There are many kinds of media dashboards, but in general consider them similar to the dashboards in an airplane that provide critical information about altitude, fuel level, and so on. In this dashboard, notice that frequencies and trends in positive or negative comments can be reported, the sources of the information, and volume of communications.24

http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-monitoring/visible-technologies-unveils-expanded-social-media-monitoring-platform/

In another dashboard, a wordle in the upper right corner visually reports the frequency of words that appear related to the company as represented by the size and color density of the word tags. Once again, the trends in volume over time, sources and authors, are important to identify to enable a reasoned investigation and response.25

Heres another example of how an organization could develop a social media strategy regarding Twitter. Notice that there are several aspects to strategy, and for each of these there is monitoring, active guidance, and response plan. Also notice that these stages and recommendations relate to the standard use of social media in forming an informed and positive presence it is not yet describing how a crisis is dealt with. 26

Moving on to the early warning system. This is an example of a decision tree that an organization could design in order to monitor and decide on appropriate action in response to early adverse communication. Take a few minutes and track the branches from type of behavior to response options.27Stage 2: Planning & prevention

Organization actionsIdentify prominent online influencers/opinion leadersUtilize new media technologies to establish online monitoring alert systemCreate a hidden or dark websiteConsider tone and language of online worldAdopt a global mindsetDevelop online crisis manual & test itStage 3: Crisis

Situational variablesUrgency of the situationCharacteristics of the publicsPotential threatsPotential costs & benefits to the organizationOrganizational actionsTailor streamlined crisis response for both online and mainstream mediaRespond within 4 hours if possibleGet CEO or member from dominant coalition to personally address stakeholdersUpfront coverage of crisis information on homepage with feedback featureLinks to third party endorsementTap on dark site if necessaryStage 1: Issues management

Predisposing variablesSize of organizationCorporate cultureBusiness exposurePR access to dominant coalitionDominant coalition enlightenmentOrganizational actionsControl development of companys websiteUpdate e-mailing lists and contact databasesImplement media monitoring service for online mediaRegister all possible domain namesFamiliarize corporate communications team with the virtual worldStage 4: Post-crisis

Organizational actionsContinue tracking the issue on mainstream and online mediaContinue to post updates on the crisis via company websiteEvaluate the crisis and review how company respondedDefine strategies to rebuild companys reputationhttp://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1858826&show=html

Over the stages of crisis, the situation changes and therefore requires different responses from the organization. Consider the stages and responses in this figure. If this were your organization, would it be able to respond in these ways?28Social media & crisis management (7:48)Crisis management and social media (3:11)Social media, crisis and reputation management (6: 59)Social media crisis and how companies can cope (6:47)Social media before and after the crisis (7:33)How to respond to negative comments on blogs and social media (2:53)Youtube minilectures & examplesDells response to bloggersNestles Facebook disasterInnovis Health uses media during flood crisis

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Here are some supplementary examples you might find interesting. Some are youtube videos and others are written documents.29Questions for class discussion

How would you present the need for a social media component in your organizations crisis planning?Do you have an example of social media related to crisis management in your workplace or one you are familiar with?Describe how your organization could develop a social media presence & monitoring. Include which media, what kind of presence, how monitored and used, staffing, and when to respond.Identify a specific crisis that could be escalated on social media. Describe step by step what you might do in using social media to mitigate the impactHow might you evaluate the utility of using social media in your crisis management plan?

the proliferation of social media

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