As was demonstrated in Haiti’s earthquake crisis this year, Social Media can play a key role in evaluating crisis issues. Already fibre connections have been restored (many thanks to NetHope and their work) and there are Internet Cafe’s popping up in the tent cities people are still living in.
Think about that for a moment: people are still living in tents, yet they want to be connected to the world.
To me, this says loud and clear how critical Social Media tools have become on a societal level to citizens. These free tools are connecting families and relief agencies, enabling family ties to remain close in desperate situations. That’s powerful.
And from our research, prices are not ridiculously expensive for access. High, yes, but not much more so than pre-earthquake.
The most popular use of these tent city Internet cafe’s is of course, Social Media tools.
A large portion of Haitian Diaspora live in Montreal, Canada and then in France. Interestingly though, for donor nations, France is third for aid support behind the U.S., Canada and UK. And France is a former colonial government.
Haiti was a fragile nation before the earthquake, although just about at the tipping point of impressive recovery, now once again a very fragile nation. On the upside is that there is no threat of conflict from another nation.
Social Media tools are drawing our world ever closer, creating a level of global fragility we’ve never known. It is also enabling families to stay connected unlike ever before, and when getting access to communicating with family over having a house is a priority, well it shows the heart of humanity and our need to be connected to one another.
Is it really that important for a board of directors to understand Social Media? It is today. They don’t need to understand how to use Twitter or the tiny details of Facebook. But what they do need to understand is a) how people use Social Media and b) how it can affect a large, mid-cap or small-cap public company or even privately held company.
Why?
Here’s a look at how activity can impact a public company, board governance and strategic direction (which is what a board is responsible for.)
1. Directors Liability: A crisis, such as JetBlue or the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico currently underway, can lead to huge public discussion online. Citizens can use Social Media tools to organize protests and gather information which can be used in litigation and puts members of the board in a liability suit situation. During and after a crisis, monitoring Social Media channels can help counsel better assess risk and potential outcomes.
2. Union Organizing: Unions are making very good use of Social Media tools. A board not paying attention to Social Media channel chatter may be blindsided by a rallying attempt at their company. One that they could have been aware of and prepared for.
3. Whistleblower Crises: It may be that a whistleblower starts placing information in select channels, such as a blog, that could lead to threats of congressional hearings or legislative changes. A whistleblower can quickly build community.
4. Legislative Impact: Groups opposed to a company’s activity (i.e. oil sector) can use Social Media tools to build potentially damaging evidence against a company. This can result in citizen connecting with their legislative or elected officials with the result of legislation that stops the company in its tracks on a proposed project.
5. Stock Price Volatility, Insider Trading Claims Etc.: An employee may post in a blog (intentionally or accidentally) information that could lead to a sell-off or drive a sudden hike in price and buy activity resulting in an SEC investigation. It may lead to board changes or the need for board members to actively engage in reputation management and public statements. It may also lead to insider trading charges and more.
There are more than these five, but they are key issues that a board may need to understand in terms of governance and strategic direction. Social Media has already impacted the board of JetBlue with their crisis a few years ago and there are likely other examples.
The challenge is that in over 90% of these companies with such board structure, it is likely the board is of the upper end of the boomer generation and may not grasp the effects of these technologies in many cases and suspect they’re only used by “youth” who couldn’t rally to impact a company. This can be a deadly mistake.
(Author: G. Crouch, MD)
A co-worker or friend sends you a link to a blog post. Someone’s ranting about your company, or maybe about you. There it is. In digital print. For all the world to see. It’s on the Web. That means at that very moment, thousands upon thousands of eyes are reading it, laughing at you, gloating and preparing witty responses to the comment section. You simply must respond, jump to defend your brand, your personal image…you start to type. Stop. Stop it right now.
I’ve seen this reaction more than a few times in the past year. It usually comes with a phone call or email “I need help” because suddenly, it is a crisis. But if you hadn’t responded, hadn’t typed out that long-winded and certainly well justified response, it wouldn’t have escalated.
This response I think, is an inheritance of the days when all we had really was newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. And if something bad was said about you, then it probably was seen by a lot of people and a response was pretty much a necessity – since you’d likely get a call from a reporter, eager to pour some more wood on the fire.
Yes, anyone can publish anything they want to the Web today in moments. Without fact checking. But that doesn’t mean many have seen that smarmy tidbit of nastiness. In fact, only a few may see it.
So before you’re tempted to start madly typing, stop. It’s time for an assessment. The blogger in question may have little or no audience. The audience they may have may also be sycophants with little further influence. Do some queries on a search engine, see what pops up. Try to assess the circle of influence of the blogger and if the “story” has spread to other Social Media channels or if it may be newsworthy. Call your PR agency or a Social Media research/consulting firm and ask them to take a quick look. You’ll have a response fairly quickly on how to proceed.
But first, assess the story and the spread. If it’s minimal, don’t engage. As soon as you do, you’ve given them power and the cats out of the bag…hissing and ready to go. A whiff of controversy and the story will spread in moments.
Keep in mind, just cause it’s out there, doesn’t mean anyone’s reading it. Millions of blogs rarely get much traffic, ever. The upside may be instant publishing, the downside is it’s also harder to get noticed.
Or what would you recommend?
(Author: Giles Crouch)
Media Analysis, Reputation•
on January 19th, 2010•
United and the broken guitar, moms insulted by Motrin, snotty-nosed Domino’s pizza employees; they’ve been analyzed and analyzed. Each element picked apart and pontificated over. I too am guilty of that. Let’s face it, they make fur juicy fodder to citizens alike and those of us engaged in the social mediasphere. Now it’s about to get a lot harder for Joe-citizen to get anywhere with social media.
Time to take a deep breath, step back and look at it from a different perspective. The likelihood of many of them happening again, to the degree that they did, is minimal. Each has changed an industry; mostly for the better. But what happens after the first big crisis in each industry?
United wasn’t the first airline to suffer from a social media crises and it wasn’t the first time United suffered from social media either. JetBlue gets that honour on valentine’s day 2007. Taco Bell will likely wear the unadorned crown of first for restaurants in 2006 with the rat scare and Domino’s second.
Most of the social media crises have happened with major brands. Not all, however; we’ve dealt with smaller businesses facing more localized crises. These big crises are likely to happen again, but one can speculate they’ll be in different industries. The airline industry groaned yet again with the United issue. Food services with Domino’s.
If citizens want to truly make a point with a negative experience via a major brand, they’ll need to become increasingly creative. Dave Carrol wrote a great tune and added a video behind it. Simply text blogging his experience likely wouldn’t have worked. We picked up on the Motrin issue more because it took a series of practitioners involved in Social Media to push out the message on how flustered moms were.
While it’s not impossible that another video of fast-food employees doing gross things to customer orders couldn’t go big, it’s not likely to happen to the degree it did with Domino’s.
There are still a lot of industries to be hit in a negative way, but as we did our research into the discussion volume around these crises, we found that each time around (with only United and the guitar incident as an exception) the volume of discussion decreased as did the viral factor and the Echo Ratio increased (the story stayed quite contained.)
Essentially, we’re saying that it’s going to get harder for the average Joe to use social media as an effective weapon for change or compensation when done wrong. Messages are 30% less viral the second time around in an industry and 65% less the third time around. The story will also have less of a long-tail effect; although it can stay alive forever in the digital world of Cyburbia.
While this can still be damaging to a company’s bottom-line, it’s less so than before; unless your industry hasn’t been hit. In that case, brace yourself if you’re the first to be targeted. Business will (and are) get savvier in dealing with them and citizens will have to work harder to get the message out.
Much emphasis on Social Media crises is focused towards large brands – JetBlue, United, Motrin etc., and there’s plenty of them. But what about the small local business? You’ll have to forgive me for not revealing the name of the client – I’m not into bringing my company down in one fell swoop, I have kids to feed after all.
It was early 2009 and a “tweet” came through my feed from someone I follow locally. They’d had lunch at a local restaurant, but were soured by the service. They said this on Twitter. Over the next 2 hours over 50 people within the city, and over 20 from outside, had engaged over this “discussion” with many relating their negative (and a some positive) experience with this restaurant. After the third “tweet” I started to follow the discussion, then started to track if it went elsewhere (most of our clients are large and in the US and UK, so this local one was of keen interest). It did. It hit Facebook and by 3PM that afternoon it had reached 3 bloggers within the city, whereupon several readers of those blogs also commented. The discussion ran to more general comparisons of bad gustatory experiences locally and other fine establishments were bashed as well. Yet the focus remained on this one particular establishment.
Our estimate of reach by 5PM that afternoon was about 4,000 eyeballs in Nova Scotia with 90% of them in the Halifax area. Now, we’re a highly connected city with 5 universities of international renown and a strong financial sector and economy. But we’re only about 400,000 people. Small next to New York city.
But that in itself shows how Social Media is becoming hyper-local and can have an impact at a very local level. When I went to see the owner a week later and presented my findings he was shocked to say the least…I had some serious explaining to do. The sad fact was, he noticed a 50% drop in business in that time period.
Fortunately the issue wasn’t quality of food, simply the speed of service. A change of the menu, some staff retraining, a little PR and some advertising and now their lunch servings are up 15% over last year. He recovered. But the impact was there. For a small business within a fairly small market.
Social Media activity can have a local impact. Negative and positive.
When we think of and mostly talk about, Social Media crises, we tend to look at the bigger stories; United Breaks Guitars, Motrin Moms, JetBlue. Let’s face it, they’re juicier and hit a broader audience. These stories bring together traditional and social media. But smaller, mostly “hidden” issues can create PR nightmares for a business.
As we experienced with a client today. For obvious reasons I can’t name them, I like having clients and don’t like making a painful issue worse. The issue didn’t get broadcast across Twitter or Plurk or similar microblogging channel. Nor did it wind it’s away through Facebook.
This crisis took place across three “closed” forums. By “closed” I mean that it was in semi-moderated forums focused to a particular topic/industry. Someone posted a topic in a forum, within a short while, others joined in, discussing a product and their feelings about that product. It started only 3 days ago, but by this morning had reached a significant volume and resulted in a large volume of calls to a contact centre and began migrating up to senior management.
We monitor for this client monthly. Which helped. But the challenge of automated Social Media monitoring tools becomes quickly apparent – most of them are locked out of these forums. And this is a huge gap in Social Media monitoring.
Although this issue was “localized” and didn’t hit broadcast Social Media levels, it still caused a drop in sales in just 2 days of 8% and forced a mid-size business to focus many hours of senior management and people resources to contend with it. Fortunately it was kept localized and didn’t seep over into more public forums.
So what are some take-aways for a situation like this?
1. Don’t rely on Google Alerts or basic monitoring services.
2. Find out where “discussions” are going on in closed forums like newsgroups, chats or discussion forums and check in weekly to see what might be going on.
3. A crisis can occur in Social Media in closed loops and cause as much damage as if it hit the more public forums.
4. Engage in these discussions (be open and disclose who you are, trying to pretend your a customer is dangerous) and stay engaged.
5. Often times, these “hidden” sides of Social Media can be of more value than more public forums.
So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience? What steps do you take in this type of issue?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
Best Practices•
on February 1st, 2009•
When a bad story breaks in the local or national newspaper or on TV, the senior management, especially of a public company, goes into a crisis management mode. Some companies have plans for this. The PR pro’s are called and the story assessed while responses are prepared. A press release might be issued and the CEO or perhaps someone else on the senior management team, makes a statement on behalf of the company. Corporate PR counsel knows the story will most likely fade within 48 hours. The news cycle is fast. This was fine, before the Social Web. Before bloggers and Twitter and…all these new channels of communication. Before technology tools enabled the general public to speak and hold sway.
It is likely now that a blogger will pick up the story and add their two-cents worth. The online version of the newspaper or TV story may have comments enabled – and people are saying what they think. On the one hand, such public commenting can help a PR pro shape a better message for response, and they know this.
More often than not, good public relations counsel are superb, sober second thought. They can be, and should be, the calm in the storm. But a response is usually part of the resolution. Sometimes the response is terse, other times more detailed depending on the level of crisis.
Unfortunately, there is often the desire to respond to bloggers in the Social Web. This knee-jerk reaction however, may be the worst route to take. In the social media crises we’ve handled, it’s usually been the result of the CEO taking a member of the publics comments or blog statements too personally and firing of a response.
It’s easy to do, and self-justify. As a CEO or president of a business or organization, they are passionate about their role and company. A clever blogger knows the buttons to push. It takes a CEO only moments to post their own rebuttal on the bloggers site. That’s when it all falls apart.
Before responding, we advise clients to step back and do some research first. Find out how popular the blogger is, if they have a wide following and if so, could the story take on legs? If a story can spread, even more damage can be done in a matter of a few hours.
Once words are out there now, they cannot be retracted or re-stated. The top recommendation we’ve made to clients when a PR crisis is about to hit the Social Web? Keep the CEO away from Internet access for a while. Let them cool their jets while the strategy is planned. Dealing with the general pubic through Social Media is very different from traditional media.
On the darker side of Social Media, it can effectively be used as a weapon to discredit a competitors product or service. It can be used to discredit a person/celebrity or to even shake up a stock. More importantly, it does not just affect big corporations. Today, Social Media can be used as a competitive weapon to hurt local or regional businesses.
We come into the area of Online Reputation Management here, but from the angle of competitive intent. What is often overlooked, is that sometimes an individual, business or stock is not under attack by a “random blogger” or group of legitimately frustrated consumers. Sometimes the attack is planned and highly coordinated; by a competitor or rival celebrity. It’s an aspect of Social Media that until now, has not been generally discussed. Through our experience however, we know it’s very real. We also predict it will become an element in corporate competitive strategy in the future.
So how come we haven’t heard about it much before? If you’re the company under attack, you may never know it was coordinated, or the way in which an outcome is settled is not one you want to announce publicly. Just dealing with the ensuing crisis is expensive enough in terms of brand reputation, PR costs and stress on internal resources and stakeholder communications. The ability to gather evidence of “where” the issue started or by “whom” can be challenging at best and is murky in legal terms.
Our case was with a petrochemical company (I can’t give any data other than the industry) who faced a sudden upswing in public complaints and was registering increased hostility from consumers and government. The story was close to hitting mainstream media. Instead, quick research was done and the story was countered effectively before it spread across more of the blogosphere or hit traditional media.
So in what way are these attacks occurring and why? A competitor can “plant” information with “apparent” evidence with a series of bloggers known to have the right following, or in bulletin boards used by retail traders, as an example. The story is usually “emotional” in nature, designed just so it will be shared and incite discussion. Then the consumer takes over, adding to and building on the story. The primary objective is to have the “issue” hit traditional media and accelerate it further.
So, why then, and who? Social activist groups are learning the power of targeting companies they feel are committing social wrongs – no surprise there. Competitors can discredit a product on launch to either stop or divert their competitors attention on the product, culling marketing and sales efforts. Damaging a brand via Social Media can result in setting a victim back many months and weakening their market position. There are a number of tools including “splogs” or “Spam Blogs” that can aid in driving a negative attack, seeding misleading messages through anonymous accounts, link spamming and more.
Such actions, if a person, organization or company is caught, can lead to serious litigation, defamation of character and slander suits. Is it happening? yes. What can you do? Certainly a monitoring tool helps, but there are certain indicators that can be analysed to give indicators an attack is not random. Proof can be challenging, but there are ways. Caught quickly, most attacks can be diverted, but monitoring remains an essential element.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)
Will the economic slowdown impact the Social Media space? Certainly. One respected writer, Rafe Needleman has already put his picks in on who might fail in the coming months. There are bound to be failures as investors look for gain, not pain. But is that such a bad thing?
Our initial take at MediaBadger is that as the economy was overheated, many stocks overvalued and the housing market way overvalued, so are many Social Media applications overhyped and underserving. Media channels have become extremely fragmented in the past decade and even more so in the past two years, with the plethora of Web 2.0 applications. There’s just too many services in certain segments; over 350 blogging services, over 200 social bookmarking applications, over 700 community services, 500+ ecommerce apps and hundreds of fil sharing, video sharing and photo sharing services. Somethings gotta give as they say.
While Web users may have breached 1 Billion, that doesn’t mean all are using or need Social Media tools and services. What we’ll likely see is a culling of services. Some will be bought out at fire sale prices by the larger players, others will just shut down and some will limp along.
We expect that microblogging like Twitter and Plurk (who’s Karma will that hurt?) may suffer sooner, along with video and photo sharing sites that aren’t under the wings of a Yahoo! or Google. Many a Social Media service have been struggling to find their ideal revenue model and falling up short.
An upside for Social Media though is that people tend to “cocoon” in harder economic times; spending more time at home and consuming entertainment media, including the Web. We expect to see a rise in Social Media use (sales of home electronics outpace other consumer products still) as this cocooning occurs. This may help some start-ups on the verge and others that survive to do better than might be expected.
We still don’t know where we’ll end up in terms of recession and for how long, but a culling of Social Media services isn’t so bad. The best will survive and may survive well, marketers will have an easier time reaching their target audiences and consumers will dictate what they want while learning to say “no” to more frivolous services. Either way, the next 12 months will pass quickly and it will be an interesting time.
What do you think will happen?
A bad news story for your company hits traditional media. You kick in the standard damage control processes and try to move beyond the issue; it’s always worked before. Except this time a prominent or even not so prominent blogger picks it up…and it spreads. Have the rules changed? Can you move beyond the story like before?
Certainly, except it may take a little longer than before, and there may be “aftershocks”. When the Blogosphere picks up on a story it can suddenly take on a life of its own. Sometimes there’s no real need to respond, other times you must respond. There are ways to manage a crisis point with Social Media, but the issue can stay hot in the Social Media world a little longer.
In most bad news incidents, the best strategy is to acknowledge the issue, state your proposed resolution and then move on to more positive stories, knowing that in traditional media, the story will blow over fairly quickly. Bloggers and microbloggers however, can add their own opinions and what was a small issue spirals out of control. Not responding can make the perceived issue worse and carry on for weeks or months.
Deciding whether or not to respond is something you need to determine with your PR team or Social Media agency. Deciding how you respond is key, along with follow up. Once you’ve said something in the Social Media sphere, it will live on. This means you may be held accountable at a later date as someone may inquire in a few months to see if you’ve lived up to the proposed solution. If not, you’ll suddenly have another crisis, this is what we call “aftershocks.” Developing a good plan for a PR crisis should always include the Social Media angle today.
With Social Media, the vital point to remember is that a story can live on far longer and resurface at any time. Sometimes you can take the high road and not respond, deflection is still very much possible, but going about it is very different in Social Media.
