We’ve been doing a fair bit of work with companies recently, helping them to dovetail social media and crisis response protocols for when the inevitable arises.
I’ve got form in this space: from my media-focused crisis communications experience in PR (cutting my teeth in the BBC during September 11th, then helping to run London’s Congestion Charging PR campaign), to then being called in by Eurostar to help them out with their snow-induced operational and social media crisis in Christmas 2009.
So this report naturally caught my eye. And I have to say, agree with pretty much every word in it.
Jeremiah Owyang and the Altimeter Group, undoubtedly one of the foremost thinkers in the social media space recently published a review of the state of readiness amongst 140+ organisations with 1000+ employees, and found a distinct lack of readiness across the board – apart from some of the very largest organisations.
Their starting point is this:
We define a social media crisis as a crises 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.
And one of his conclusions – that there is a significant amount that most organisations could do to better prepare themselves for a crisis is undoubtedly one we’d agree with 100%.
Which is, I guess, one of the reasons that we’re very busy in this space recently.
The full report is here – well worth a read…
And if you’d like to talk about how your organisation can better join up your social media and crisis response teams, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.