An introduction to the impact of social media on communications, given at the social media crisis management event on 5 December 2012.

1. The impact of social media on crisis and issues management

2. Sometimes, a social media storm can be started by human error. An errant tweet
might find its way onto your Twitter stream because of a simple mistake.
That might be setting up auto-retweet wrongly. BT blamed technology for an
extremely sweary, racist and abusive tweet that went out from its official account.

3. Or that error might be putting a typo in an auto-tweet, like this one that went out
from the UN stating that Ban-Ki-Moon was calling for a 1-state solution in the Middle
East. The tweet was scheduled to go out while its author was on a conference call.

4. Avoid drunk Tweeting. Although I love the official response: a great
example of using humour to diffuse an issue.

5. Or it might be Tweeting from the wrong account, like this infamous anti-
Obama tweet from KitchenAid, for which it later apologised

6. Sometimes, it’s nothing to do with
communications, but it’s the fault of your
product, my favourite being the new
Apple maps which couldn’t find its own
stores.
Image from Anorak.co.uk

7. Image from Anorak.co.uk
And although this picture is nothing to do with
social media, I just love how far this story
travelled, even making the London
Underground tube noticeboards.

8. Or it might be the fault of a marketing idea
that’s just asking for ridicule. I’m not sure what
BIC was doing when it launched pens for girls –
honestly, I’ve NO idea how women managed to
write before these came out – and no great
surprise, it had a lot of flack on social
media, including Twitter and review sites.

9. I should probably say here that BIC claims its
pink pens have been very
successful, particularly with American markets.
Apart from people who watch Ellen
presumably – BIC’s PR team asked Ellen to
review the pens, which was a really bad idea –
she ripped them apart.

10. But I wouldn’t really call these examples crises, as such, more a pain in the
neck to deal with. Most of them won’t have any noticeable impact on
sales, they’ll just see a few of the comms team working all weekend.
For today’s purpose, when we talk about a social media crisis, we mean a
crisis that’s happening in the real world, that’s playing out over social
media.
The way this happens has changed out of all recognition in the last 10
years. News organisations break stories on Twitter these days. Sometimes
that news is based on mis-information.

11. At the end of 2010, Qantas suffered engine
failure on one of its Airbus A380 flights.
Without going into the technical details, a
piece of the engine broke off and fell onto an
island in Indonesia.
The first reports that came out identified it as
wreckage from a crashed plane – and looking
at this picture, you can see why – but it wasn’t
true, the plane was still flying.
The picture of the so called wreckage went up
onto Twitter and news sites, was identified as
the A380, and was reported on Reuters and
CNBC.
Photo credit: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/qantas-jet-engine-fails-witnesses-tell-of-hearing-explosion-20101104-17f49.html

12. The plane landed in Singapore, although not without drama, and
Qantas put out a statement quickly saying all the passengers were
safe. But even so, the story took its toll.
“We first knew it was a problem when our share price started to collapse.
And that was because these reports coming out of Twitter that were
reported by one mainstream media outlet on the basis of the Twitter reports
that the aircraft had crashed in Indonesia started obviously causing a
problem with the share price.” (Qantas CEO Alan Joyce)

13. You can see what the team was trying to
do, re-directing queries to Qantas, but this
might have been a worried relative of a
passenger, finding out whether the plane had
crashed or not. There’s no phone
It must have been chaos at Qantas
number, twitter handle or even an email
when this story landed, and its teams
address here. There is, however, a helpful link
weren’t on top of it at first. Qantas
to the Travel Insider magazine.
Travel Insider is a Qantas travel
magazine run by an separate editorial
Having said that, Qantas did a number of
team, who should have had a clear
things extremely well, including uploading a
escalation policy for an event like
very quick Q&A, including outline details of
this, but clearly didn’t. You can see
what had happened, a dedicated page on its
here the team’s response to someone
site including links to the flights scheduler.
trying to establish what had
happened.

14. The pilot was absolutely
amazing, and his
calmness under
pressure was widely
reported in the post-
incident analysis (which
also mentioned the
training that pilots get
for exactly this kind of
incident).
The thing that really made the difference, though, is
the thing that you couldn’t control – the pilot’s
response. Needless to say this was recorded and
uploaded to YouTube and was the story that
accompanied the BBC piece.
Watch the video on YouTube, as it’s a great example
of how social media affects news.
http://youtu.be/yK5SzV4OBF0

15. Luckily the passengers couldn’t see what was going on
under the wing, where it looked like this.

16. Until social media, when we knew there was an issue about to break, we generally had
a good few hours to deal with it, while a journalist checked facts, found a suitable
interviewee, got hold of the company to respond and so on. In that time, it was often
possible to manage how the story broke, by providing alternative views, or dealing with
disgruntled customers before the press got hold of them (obviously I mean dealing with
them in the sense of making sure they were compensated and happy, rather than
anything more sinister than that!).
Social media’s completely changed all that.

17. This example is significantly less serious, but is a nice example of how social
media spreads news. When British Gas put its prices up in the autumn, the
Evening Standard tweeted the price rise.
Paul Lewis, who’s a financial journalist – and any Radio 4 listeners will know
him as a presenter of Moneybox – was the first to retweet the story, and within
an hour, it was being tweeted by every major news source.
Credit: http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/andrew.smith/diary.of.a.breaking.news.story.on.twitter

18. Some called it a rumour circulating on Twitter, but that’s enough these days. By
mid-afternoon, the news outlets who’d reported the rumour were confirming it
as fact, and by 4 o’clock ITV was asking consumers what they thought of the price
hike on Twitter.
Social media in this case wasn’t just breaking news, it was creating news, and
providing a snapshot of consumer views to be used in the reporting of that news.
Of course, in this case, the facts were true, and the chances are they would have
been a fuss about it whether British Gas has managed the release of those facts
or not. They chose not to in this case, saying they couldn’t comment on
‘rumours’.

19. 1 What issues are you likely to face?
2 Which are avoidable, and which unavoidable?
3 What action do you need to take to avoid a crisis?

20. The big question, though, is can you avoid a social media crisis?
The answer is sometimes. I break crises broadly into two categories: those you can’t
avoid, and those you can, if you take the appropriate action. Unavoidable crises are, of
course, the most serious– natural disasters, transport crashes, illness and so on - for the
most part can’t be avoided. Qantas would fall into this category. You can always prepare
for them, but you can’t control them.
But if you plan for a crisis, by identifying the issues facing your company, you might find
that there are some situations you could avoid by taking the right business action. Crisis
avoidance is very much a business – not just a communications – issue. I wish there was a
PR magic wand to make the bad stuff go away, but sadly it doesn’t work like that.
And sometimes you might just need to accept you’re going to have a hard time: staff
up, and ride it out: it’s unlikely that British Gas would have reduced its prices in order to
avoid a few headlines, for example.

21. I quite often get asked what this means for
companies, and whether social media is a good
thing or a bad thing for corporate
reputation, and I think the answer depends on
how businesses behave. I do think that it
means companies have to be more honest and
open, and that ‘spin’ doesn’t have a place in
this new world. If you spin the truth, or try to
cover something up, you’ll mostly get found
out.

22. The most important thing, though, is that to manage that reputation before
the crisis hits. The reputation you have before you go into the crisis is the
one that will see you through it.
Whatever goodwill or badwill you have banked with customers, prospects
and media, will be what sees you through, so make sure it’s goodwill.