It can take up to two hours after a serious incident for social media to carry the correct facts about an incident, according to early results from s study by the University of East London. After an air crash in Cork, Ireland, in February 2011, the first comment appeared on Facebook one minute after the crash.
Writing in the Crisis Communications discussion group in LinkedIn, UK crisis veteran Bob Wade, a former UK Government crisis adviser, comments that press officers can no longer regard social media as outside their sphere in a crisis. The University of East London study, says Bob, finds that tweets go through three phases during a major incident:
Perception - information seeking and sharing
Comprehension - piecing the facts together
Projection - sharing opinions and blame.
Bob comments that it's obvious that crisis communicators need to be in at the Perception stage.
In a crisis, establishing the facts is the most difficult task in the early stages. It's vital that you are rock solid on any fact before you go public on it. Speed is the enemy of accuracy. Yet we need to claim back the ground as the authority on information on our organisation is a crisis. So it follows that it's now essential to engage quickly on social media as well as mainstream media.
The mainstream media remains the driver of opinion in a crisis in my view. It's a question of volume, and that may change. But the symbiotic relationship between social media and the mainstream outlets means you have to deal with both.
You can join in the discussion on the Crisis Communication group by joining LinkedIn
(Posted from London)
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