As evidenced by the Costa Concordia cruise ship tragedy, social media outlets offer real-time updates on breaking stories, and businesses must adapt their crisis communication and reputational risk strategies to stay ahead of the game
Without question, companies are not taking appropriate steps to prepare themselves for effective communication during times of a crisis. In the digital age, where social media platforms are quickly replacing traditional media as sources of information, the communication landscape has changed for all companies across all industry sectors.
The biggest change brought about by the online world is speed. The time to react has shrunk enormously. The generally accepted rule for communications used to be that in times of a crisis, boards, executive teams and issues managers may have had an hour, sometimes two, to react to a breaking issue. This time would be used to release media holding statements, contact key stakeholders, investors, employees and so forth.
Today, this window is now around fifteen minutes. As a result, traditional business continuity planning practices, whilst broadly adequate, need to embrace and focus far more comprehensively on better communication strategies that are geared to this changing landscape.
We only have to look at the recent tragedy off the coast of Italy, where the Costa Concordia capsized, to understand this issue of speed and the power of social media.
Following the grounding of the ship on the evening of 13 January 2012, onshore witnesses and passengers who had managed to evacuate immediately began uploading images through a range of sites including Facebook and Twitter. By the time Europe woke later in the morning, amplification on social media had reached saturation to the point where traditional news outlets were uploading online images and video, and the ship’s corporate website, failing to cope with the level of online traffic, collapsed.
For a three-to-four hour period during the day, social media represented the sole direct interface with the ship’s company. Over the course of the next few days the incident led to over 35,000 tweets, 10,000 blog mentions, 34,000 news mentions online and 4,500 YouTube video mentions – all of which were in different languages and time zones.
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