Enough of the theory (for the time being).  There is a very practical impact of social media that affects every organisation right now.  This is the fact that every crisis management plan and process is now out of date – unless it has been made ’social media compliant’.

If you now have a crisis, you have no time or space within which to hide.  You are essentially in the business of performing ‘live’ within a rolling 24/7 press conference.  This requires different skills and preparation – just as doing live TV is different from making a documentary.

However, this is not all bad news.  Social media allows you to communicate directly with the people you need to influence, without having to rely on the filter of the media.  This can make it easier to get information out much quicker, to dampen concerns and emotions and to limit the extent to which a crisis can develop or spread.

There are five things an organisation needs to do to make their crisis preparation social media compliant.

1. Monitor social media in real-time
2. Establish a management process that delivers a response that is quicker and more specific to the needs of social media, rather than adapted only to the needs of traditional media
3. Create an information publication platform that is optimised to spread information effectively through social networks
4. Re-purpose your existing information so that it can spread easily through social networks
5. Incorporate social media into your crisis training.

Looking at these points in more detail.

1.  Real time monitoring

It is now the case that almost everything that may become elevated into a crisis will surface first in the world of social media, probably in Twitter.  This is because crises become real when they touch people and social media gives people the tools to publicise what they are seeing, thinking or doing in real time not in the time prescribed by publication deadlines.

In the past, the start of a crisis was usually marked from the time you received ‘the phone call’ from ‘the journalist’ (most crisis simulation exercises often start with this).  Now it will probably start in a tweet from someone immediately connected to the event.  By the time you receive the call from ‘the journalist’, the crisis will probably be in full flight and you will already have missed opportunities to gain control.  It is also quite possible that ‘the journalist’ will be monitoring Twitter, thus the call, when it comes, will be a lot earlier than might otherwise have been the case.

Monitoring the social media space is therefore essential and it is important to ensure that this monitoring is as close to real time as possible.  Real time monitoring gives you the opportunity to have the maximum amount of that most vital asset in crisis response – time.  Also, a tweet may be a spark, not necessarily the full fire.  Prompt action can sometimes stop a crisis developing in the first place.

Having a monitoring service that tracks buzz or sentiment, monitors influential blogs or produces weekly or monthly reports and analysis is of no use.  You don’t have to be an influential blogger to start a social media firestorm.  Anyone at the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time with a mobile phone can do it.

Real time monitoring is not difficult.   All that is required is a little initial instruction and then keeping in touch with the latest techniques – just simply add “social AND media AND monitoring” to the list of things you monitor.

I currently recommend using Netvibes to establish a desktop monitoring dashboard that pulls together in one place all the various ‘feeds’ from a variety of monitoring sources.  A daily, preferably hourly, check of you monitoring dashboard by someone in your corporate communications department, press office or PR agency, is then all that it takes.

2.  New response process

In the old world we had the luxury of an element of down-time between the publication and production deadlines of the media outlets that were most important in shaping a story.  This could be used to craft messages, conduct interviews, consider strategy etc.  This time has gone.  Crises now play out in a far more relentless and transparent way with social media being the engine that drives it.

This requires organisations to change their crisis management process to take account of two things:

Speed: Crises now happen in ‘Twitter Time’ – essentially real time.  Your strategy has to match this.  Communication needs to be issued much quicker and it needs to be updated constantly.  This means it is no longer possible to have some pre-prepared statements which can be tailored and issued and expect that this will buy the time necessary to work behind-the-scenes preparing more detailed information.  Much like managing live television, organisations need to have sufficient information to hand in order to avoid the development of ‘dead air’ so that they can be seen to constantly engaged in a conversation even if what is said still remains a variant on some core messages.

Specificity: It is no longer sufficient to rely on very generic statements to adequately convey a corporate response. These may have worked when designed to be included within a 500 word news article or as a 5 second sound-bite in a radio or TV segment, but they don’t work within the social media discourse.  One of the principal effects of social media is creation of a new type of audience – the connected crowd.  This has the power and collective influence of a mass audience, but it cannot be communicated to via mass communication methods.  It can only be influenced on the basis of individual communication or conversations.  This is the essence of something like Twitter – each tweet has to be seen as an individual conversation, but it is a conversation taking place in front of an audience of everyone.  Tweets and blog posts need to be treated as though they were questions from journalists in a traditional press conference – i.e. something that requires a specific answer but one that is also phrased to inform and control the whole audience.  In fact the analogy of constant performance in rolling 24/7 press conference is quite a useful one to help understand how to manage a crisis in the social media world.

Managing these two factors of speed and specificity requires two things.  Firstly an organisation needs to be able to draft in many more people to manage the conversational side of social media – monitoring things like Twitter and responding at an individual level to what is being said.  The importance of this cannot be underestimated.  One of the frequent complaints of those who have had to manage crises in the Twitter world is the fact that Twitter has become so influential but also so inaccurate.  This is hardly surprising – Twitter is not a considered medium, it is more a registration of initial impressions and emotions often based on incomplete knowledge.  This can make it extremely attractive as fodder for the traditional media who can use it to access from a desktop the sort of raw emotion that is otherwise difficult and expensive to capture.  Twitter therefore needs to be calmed and corrected as much as possible – and this can only be done via the full-time (possibly even 24/7) attention of dedicated personnel.

Secondly, as with managing live news coverage of an event, the more information that is available or ‘in the can’ the better.  Trying to eke-out a conversation on the basis of a restricted amount of information is very difficult.  However, if people can be deflected to relevant sources of information, either specific to an event or to provide background and context, this lightens the conversational burden.

This means having more information prepared, but also producing a much broader range of information during a crisis which talks directly to people, rather than being crafted to influence media coverage.  For example, rather than simply issue a written statement, video the CEO presenting this statement and host this on YouTube.  Here you have one or two minutes to tell your story, rather than 5 or ten seconds within someone else’s interpretation of your story.  Such a video is also dual purpose, because increasingly the TV media will use this as though it were a video news release and also include it in their reporting.

Having this information prepared, and having it available in a format which makes it easy to spread within social networks, will make the job of managing and controlling a crisis much easier.  This will involve using third-party content hosts such as YouTube and Flickr.

We recommend doing a root-and-branch review of a crisis management process and adopting it so that more people can be brought to bear, more information is prepared in advance and also the response strategy is changed to align itself with the need for both a constant feed of information and also the opportunity to “broadcast” direct to the people you want to talk to.

3.  New response platform

It has always been important is a crisis to get your message out as quickly as possible.  In the pre-internet days this could be achieved through the channels that fed the traditional media – mass press releases and newswires.

When websites became the norm at the end of the 80s many organisations developed ‘dark’ microsites that were used as information platforms to be rolled-out in the event of a crisis.  This practice, sensible as it was, is now redundant because traditional microsites are now not the most effective tools to publish digital content.  Traditional websites and microsites are designed as places to contain information – rather than spread it.  The social media space is characterised by the fact that information is not held in one place – it is portable and therefore is moved and shared around networks.  You therefore need a platform that is optimised to launch and spread information through the social media space.

This means using social media software to create an information platform.  This can be a ‘dark’ platform or it can become a conventional on-line newsroom that simply becomes re-focused in the event of a crisis.  The advantage of such a platform is that it is adapted to the social media world.  Information can be added or updated very easily and quickly, everything published is search-engine friendly, features such as RSS and email subscription are already built-in and it is easy to establish links with third-party content hosts such as YouTube and Flickr.

There are proprietary on-line newsroom products available and every digital agency in town will tell you it can build you one of these (for a price).  However, all of the necessary features are available within blogging software such as WordPress.  WordPress is free, very easy to use and means that a completely bespoke platform can be created without reliance on a generic solution or an outside supplier.  Here is a great example of how the American Red Cross used WordPress to establish an information hub to handle a specific crisis. This is a very basic site, which uses standard WordPress templates and was probably set-up very quickly.  For more polished examples of social media newsrooms take a look at Electrolux GM Europe or Scania

I believe that every organisation should have such a platform prepared, but also consider not keeping it ‘dark’ but use it as an online / social media newsroom as part of day-to-day communications.

4.  Re-purpose your content

I have already mentioned the need to have information to hand in order to make it easier to sustain the ‘conversation’ and also to have information that is in a format that is easy to find and spread through social media channels.

Probably quite a lot of this you already have, but it is buried somewhere within your existing website or contained within ‘static’ word documents.

As part of the review of process and preparation this information needs to be retrieved and re-purposed to work within social media.  This will mostly revolve around ensuring that there is adequate background information available in video, image and text forms and that this is hosted in sites such as YouTube and Flickr with text information (up-to-date biographies, company information etc), held within your publishing platform.

Of all the steps, this is probably the easiest and one which will actually be of benefit to you irrespective of whether you are in a crisis or not.  It is worth remembering that YouTube is a major search engine it its own right – second only to Google for many people.  Organisations spend vast amounts of money on search engine optimisation, yet frequently pay no attention at all to their YouTube ‘real estate’.  You should exert the maximum amount of control over your organisation’s name tag in YouTube as well as sites such as flickr and delicious.

5.  Build social media into your crisis training

It is no use running training sessions that are based around response to only the traditional media.  Given the centrality of social media in the playing-out of any crisis, this has to be replicated in training – both so that what you train for is as close as possible to reality, but also so that you start to understand how things like Twitter actually work.

I have devised a way of running a training session that has ‘live’ social media built into it – however, this is one area where I am not going to share the details (I do have to earn a living).  If you want to organise one of these you will need to contact me directly – stacynet@googlemail.com

• Tweets Are Coming to LinkedIn – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
  Bringing Twitter into LinkedIn is much more sensible that Facebook's attempts to replace Twitter. Twitter is an infrastructure. You get its benefits by incorporating it – not by trying to build your own (unless you can build something that is much better)
  (tags: twitter linkedin)

• GM, Kellogg, Nestle Beat to the Tweet as Squatters Take Over Twitter Names – Advertising Age – Digital
  This is an important issue. Bag your twitter territory now – even if you don't do anything else for the time being. Remember – Dominos Pizza is not @dominos in twitter – it is @DPZInfo. Not good.
  (tags: twitter squatting)

I must confess I am sometimes a bit slow on the uptake and certain new social media thingies just slip by relatively un-noticed.  Thus it was with the announcement of Twitter lists a week or so ago.  I had a quick glance at it, reckoned that there was nothing a Twitter list could do that my User Lists in Seesmic don’t already do, and let it pass.

But today it has hit me.  Forget listing other people – the number of times people list me is (or will rapidly become) my highly visible social media popularity score.  Its basically the X Factor / Pop Idol for social media types.  I checked my home page (something a rarely have reason to do) and found I was listed by one other person.  I checked Antony Mayfield (example of bona fide social media expert) – he is listed by 28 already – and he hasn’t even made any lists himself yet.  Inferiority complex looms.  What could be worse than being in a competition you never asked to enter (but I guess that is not a bad definition of social media for you).

Forget numbers of followers, forget blog subscribers – its the number of lists you are one that is going to be the key “performance metric”.  Also, of course, the names of the lists you are on are pretty revealing.  Being on a list labelled “total plonkers” is not good.  Being on a list called “social media gurus” is nice.  My one listing to date is under “cultura-digital” – think I quite like that.  Antony has a “must read” and “social media smarts” on his list of listings as well as the “movers and shakers” I listed him under on the one list I have made to date.  But then I notice that the person who has him on the “social media smarts” list is someone who also follows me.  So I didn’t make the cut!

Oh dear – this is going to get messy.

(Encouraging update: I now notice my listings have grown to three – just while writing this post.  Perhaps all is not lost)

Here is an excellent article that highlights one of the classic mistakes of social media.  This is the assumption that social media is just another channel you can use to reach a consumer, rather than a channel that consumers use to reach you.  This results in the misplaced belief that an ad agency, or even traditional digital agency, can therefore “do” social media.  They can’t – because their expertise and business model is rooted in the world of the 0ne-to-many mass message.

I suspect the Toyota example referred to in this article will be a painfull thing to watch play out – for all the reasons the article highlights.

The big question is this:  how many organisations are going to engineer these sorts of car crashes before they wake up to what social media is all about?  Quite a lot I would suspect.

In the meatime – I would suggest the following precautionary principle – never, ever, let an ad agency, or media agency anywhere near a social media initiative.  And also take special care when asking a digital agency to get involved – simply because digital agencies make money selling web sites / platforms / digital places.  The whole point of social media is to get out of digital places and operate in digital spaces (conversations).  Note – this particular car crash I spotted a while back was created by a digital agency, also for an automotive client.

A number of recent twitterstorms (#trafigura, #janmoir etc) have once again raised the issue, at least in the space that is occupied by the traditional media, of what is the role / point / whateverness of Twitter.  This Guardian article neatly sums up much of the argument to date.

Here is an explanation that no-one has yet proposed.  Twitter is the third wave of digital media – media that is defined not by a single  act of publication, but by multiple acts of observation.  It is a bit tricky to get your head around.

The first wave was when content was tied to a means of distribution (web site) and was therefore not revolutionary because it obeyed all the previous rules of publication (where the means of distribution shaped the content). The content was defined entirely by its place (of publication).

The second wave was where content was liberated from one distribution partner and free to become more promiscuous – putting itself about a bit between multiple digital places.  So a bit of content could start of as a blog post, but also have within it a video that lives in YouTube, and be included as a link in a tweet, or be an update to a Facebook page etc.  Content here was influenced by place of origin, but the influence of place was less.

The third wave is where content is completely separated from a means of distribution.  This is what Twitter is – especially a Twitter tag.  A twitter tag doesn’t exist in a particular place – it only exists through the act of search.  Likewise – tweets as a whole are just “out there” in digital space.

The shift from place to space is the future of media / communication / content – we don’t even yet have a name for the type of stuff that will sit in this space.  Within this space, content (or whatever we end up calling it) is defined not by the act of publication, but by the act of observation – and Twitter is the first example of a media / something that is defined as such.

Zurich Insurance has just lost a tape on which was data on 51,000 of its customers.  I know this because I am one of them.  It is pretty major data too – bank account details, address, details of specific items insured and details on your security arrangements (safes, alarms etc).  Basically – short of handing over the keys to your house this is the next best thing, if it ends up in the wrong hands.

Luckily, there appears to be no evidence that this information has ended up in the wrong hands – according to Zurich.

What is going to be interesting is to see how this issue pans out.  At the moment it hasn’t made it to mainstream news – just an item on the BBC website, its not in broadcast bulletins.  It is dominating the Zurich space in social media however.

Zurich’s response has been to issue information to those affected – letter signed by CEO with information and apology, a reasonably detailed Q&A, offered free identity theft protection service for a year and set up a helpline (answered promptly and helpfully I might add) – a text book response.

Presumably it has mounted a heavyweight conventional media relations crisis plan.  But what it hasn’t done, thus far, is address the social media space at all.  Neither has it really given a huge amount of information about just what happened and why – other than to say it was lost in South Africa during a routine transfer 14 months ago.  Information not calculated to provide particular reassurance I would venture to suggest.  There are no plans at this stage to provide more information since the “investigation is still on-going” – according to the customer service rep who went to ask her manager specifically on this point.

Will Zurich get away with this response?  It will be interesting to see.  At the moment Zurich have sort-of ticked the information box, but they are very light on reassurance.

If I was advising them I would say that at the very least they should get into the social media space – in terms of monitoring and responding – at least on Twitter.  I would create an information hub (blog-based) and put the Q&A information there.  I would suggest becoming more personal than a letter from the CEO that is clearly not from the CEO – statement and apology on YouTube perhaps or a more personalised apology with picture attached.   I would announce now a commitment to report back on the results of the “ongoing investigation”  – the hub can be the platfrom to do this.

I can see the temptation to try and keep the lid on this – but even if this approach is successful (and they rarely are) the issue, as with all crises, is what happens next.  As a Zurich customer I have accepted their apology, I am appreciative of the information they have provided – but I am not reassured.  Losing tapes in South Africa is not what I expect from an organisation I am going to entrust with sensitive information.  I will need to see evidence that this problem has been fixed.  And by this I mean actual evidence – not bland statements.

Social media is an ideal space to provide this reassurance – lets see what happens.

• BREAKING: Google Announces Social Search
  This, together with the announcement that tweets are now Googleable, could be the start of something big. Google's biggest problem to datehas been the inability to penetrate social media. It looks like they are doing this hand-in-hand with trying to own people's individual social connections (i.e. Google Profile). Can see the commercial rationale here, but trying to build this wall around things could limit its social acceptibility and therefore use. There can't be conditions attached to search
  (tags: Google search social)
• Coca-Cola launches social media campaign to spread its Open Happiness message | News | New Media Age
  This is what i call a web1.5 idea – i.e. basically a traditonal mass audience idea that uses social media channels for distribution. Interesting to watch – it may well be that its social components will not be sufficient to make it really work in these channels and it will become another one of those beached whales – a mass media idea washed-up on the social media coastline. But maybe not.
  (tags: coke campaign)

Last night I watched the BBC Panorama programme on Ryan Air – an airline that manages to be at the same time successful but hugely unpopular.  Funnily enough it coincided with the BBC World’s Fast:track programme, with a segment (featuring yours truly) about how you can use social media to complain about travel experiences.  One of the companies featured here was Ryan’s Air’s rival Easyjet, show-casing their success in monitoring and responding to customers in Twitter – an approach to customers that is the polar opposite of Ryan Air’s.

Ryan Air and Easynet make for a fascinating comparison when it comes to looking at the power of stories and how they can be used to drive businesses.  The product of Ryan Air and Easyjet is basically the same (low cost airline), their propositions are very similar (price based) but their stories are vastly different, although still based around the price proposition.  The Easyjet story could be summarised as “You only pay for what you want” whereas the Ryan Air story is “You only get what you pay for”.

Both organisations have built very strong, compelling and credible stories around this.  The result is that, given a choice (i.e. same price, time and destination) the vast majority of people would choose an Easyjet flight.  This is because the Easyjet story is warm and inclusive and about giving power to the consumer.  The Ryan Air story is hard, brutal and manipulative.

Why, therefore, is Ryan Air so successful?   Michael O’Leary – boss of Ryan Air – has made the hard calculation that this difference doesn’t matter because the operational efficiencies he can get by driving his business around his unfriendly story outweight any negative customer sentiment.  This is because he is in a market that is highly price sensitive but where everyone knows that basic product standards cannot slip below a certain level because of airline regulation.

You could also say the Ryan Air story is more effective – in the sense that is absolutely pervasive across the organisation.  It informs the way it treats staff, aircraft manufacturers, airport owners.  Ryan Air is therefore almost universally despised and feared in a way that Easyjet is not necessarily universally loved.

Who has therefore got the best story?

At the moment, you could say the numbers favour Ryan Air.  It is not a nice story, but it is effective.  However, it is a story that is tailored to a business that has grown by creating a new segment of the market – people that basically didn’t fly frequently before and are prepared to put up with anything in pursuit of a cheap deal.   However, air travel is probably never going to be signifiantly cheaper than it is right now because pretty much all the surplus costs have been squeezed out of the model.  All that can happen going forwards is cost increases driven by energy shortages and various additional taxes imposed by governments seeking to meet emissions targets. While this will make price even more important, it will hit hardest those people that Ryan Air has built its growth upon.   At the same time, many of the new frequent-flyers that Ryan Air has created are going to becoming more sophisticated and discriminatory.  These factors will favour a softer, customer-centric “only pay for what you want” story away from the brutal “you only get what you pay for” approach of Ryan Air.

So my money is on Easyjet for the long-term, but Michael O’Leary has probably got a few miles left in the tank.

You may well know about the case last week of The Guardian versus oil trader Trafigura.  The Guardian has been running a campaign against Trafigura concerning dumping toxic waste in west Africa.  Trafigura has been very active in using legal means to prevent information about this spreading – including obtaining an injunction preventing The Guardian from reporting a question rasied on the issue in Parliament.  However, the information leaked / spread via social media, Twitter in particular, and the injunction was lifted.

My point is that this little piece of history  – i.e. the visibility of the #trafigura tag on which most of the action took place – will only last for a couple of weeks and then it will be gone.  This is because Twitter only keeps content in tags visible for this period.  I think this is a serious problem – see Twitter is making then destroying history.