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Disaster At The Speed Of Light

In the by-gone era of mainstream media, crisis communication was at its most fundamental level a spokesperson-to-media gatekeeper proposition. Today, no truer thing can be said than this -- you are no longer in control.

Reputations can take significant hits in just a few hours, not days. Brands are in many instances the most valuable asset a corporation owns and are at risk if crisis in the digital age is not handled correctly.

Social Media Crisis Management

If Facebook were a country, it would be larger than Japan. When the swine flu crisis first gained international notoriety, tweets on the subject exceeded 10,000 per hour.

The good news is that messages can be conveyed in social media to consumers, investors and employees without the editorial media filter. The bad news is that not everyone will like it or agree and you're going to have to be prepared to hear about it. The paradigm that remains constant through all crisis conditions though and should inform your efforts to move with intelligence, transparency, and speed are:

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• Perception leads reality

• Fear drives perception

• Messages and images can spread fear

Response Strategy

With the digital age, corporations now live in glass houses. If something can be known by the public, it will be. The age of sweeping a mistake under the rug is long gone. Honesty is the best policy and when mistakes are made people are willing to forgive when the problem is openly acknowledged.

The Internet is a beautiful place for listening and understanding the conversations that are going on around you. Much can be learned in real-time about what is being said, as well as the scope of the audience participating.

How you react and respond is critical to resolving a crisis. What you say and how you've said it will be seen exactly as you serve it up. It's important to recognize the online world as one of human conversation. The Internet presents an opportunity to humanize your organization and you can do this by giving your leaders an opportunity to talk directly to participating audiences with a voice that conveys empathy and honesty.

Preparation Meets Opportunity

The best way to survive a crisis in the digital age is to take action now. You should already have a presence on social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter to aggregate followers and fans before the storm hits. It won't do you much good to be inventing these networks in the midst of crisis when a fan base simply doesn't exist.

Not sure if you're ready? Can you get a video of your CEO on YouTube within three hours any time of the day or night? If yes, you've come a long way. If not, then the crisis infrastructure needs some work.

Flashpoint Response

It's important to know that social media platforms do not intersect. Response strategy must recognize the unique separation of platforms and respond tweet to tweet, blog to blog and video to video.

When Dominos Pizza experienced its crisis involving employee videos aired on YouTube, its initial response, while done skillfully, did not stem the tide of its dropping reputation scores. It was a press release response to a video. The platforms don't intersect. Trouble continued until the company responded at the flashpoint with its own video.

In the digital age you may not be able to prevent the dissemination of inaccurate information around you, but you are able to convey your message directly to the end recipient in a manner you've never been able to do previously -- and that's a good thing.

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