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So, you set out to create a website, accessible to the public, aimed at helping your employees budget. You have hopes of helping them out, but let’s be real here, you’re also looking to grab you some good PR in the process. Once you get started, however, you realize that there is no way a typical employee at your organization makes enough to live on, even with a second job, and leaving out minor expenses like food, water, and clothing…because those are luxury items, right?
Most of us would scrap the project on the spot, but not McDonald’s! The company, which has already run into a few stumbling blocks while getting acquainted with how the modern web works, must not have thought it was a problem because they went live. As could be expected, the company took a beating in the media, largely as result of the buzz generated following video, from the activists at Low Pay is Not Okay:
So far, during an overwhelming flood disaster, Calgary emergency personnel and police have performed incredibly well.
Twitter? Absolutely not!
As flooding surprised the city last Thursday, Calgary Police put its crisis management plan into action. Part of the plan included using its official Twitter account @CalgaryPolice. Providing updates, critical crisis information and engaging with residents wherever possible.
That is, until Twitter shut down the account for exceeding the daily 1,000-post limit....
...Burger King’s Twitter account was hacked today, with the hacker turning the company’s Twitter page into an offensive mock-up of a McDonalds Twitter channel. An hour and fifteen minutes later, the account was suspended, but not before the news spread across the social media fishbowl at lightning speed. As often happens, a huge amount of basement punditry has already begun. I’ve already had to call BS when I saw someone asserting that it took Burger King “too long” to address the situation....
...On February 8th, the New York Time’s Josh Broder released a scathing review of the Tesla Model S, claiming it was unfit for cold weather driving. The problem was, according to Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, there were factual inaccuracies in the piece. Matter of fact, according to him, the review “was fake” and he would produce some hard data to back that up. Yesterday, he did, and it’s quite shocking. It turns out Broder did a number of things to, at least apparently, purposely sabotage the test. Here are just a few....
A lot of discussion and PR thought leadership have been focused on managing crises in this age immediate communications and networked audiences. However, a fascinating situation that’s unfolding right now between the New York Timesand Tesla Motors highlights the important opportunity brands have to tell their side of the story immediately and convincingly when they have a dispute with the news coverage, and it sure beats the daylights out of having a correction or clarification printed three days after the fact. Simply put, brands don’t have to take what they consider to be unfair or biased coverage lying down....
Rumors disseminated via social media could “wreak havoc” on the world economy, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum titled “Global Risks 2013.” The deliberate or accidental spreading of misinformation, poetically termed “digital wildfires” by the report, could result in mass stock sell-offs as well as (even) more serious consequences like disorganized, panicked mass evacuations -- basically stampedes on a giant scale that could cause thousands of deaths. These cheerful thoughts are only a few of an array of threats to the world economy identified by WEF, including plenty of things unrelated to social media or technology per se: if you like you can also worry all night about a global pandemic, runaway climate change resulting in mass flooding, and even a visit by an advanced alien civilization (really). But social media provides the most interesting anxiety fodder, in my humble op-ed, in part because its capacity for sowing chaos has already been amply demonstrated....
If you haven’t heard of Health Management Associates (HMA), that’s ok, few would probably know who they are. That is unless you watched the 60 Minutes segment this past Sunday on how they are allegedly encouraging administrators and physicians at hospitals they own to admit as many patients as possible, in order to boost profits. The public company, headquartered in Naples, FL and whose shares are traded on the NYSE, “through its subsidiaries owns and operates (15) general acute care hospitals and other health care facilities in non-urban communities”, as reported on their Wall Street Journal company profile. If you did see the segment and immediately wondered about a company response to the allegations, then one of your first instincts may have been to see what it was, and maybe (like me) you hopped on Facebook to see what they were posting, damage control, community engagement, etc. Here is a $5.1 billion company I thought, with a gigantic network and hundreds of thousands of patients moving in and out of their facilities every year. Surely they are on social media by now, taking advantages of its potential to reach out, interact, inform, and entertain their community. Instead, I found nothing. No social media presence at all. Zip. If you click around their Web site it looks clean, informative, professional, and…missing something. The absence of social media channels for a company who clearly now has a crisis on their hands makes you wonder why they decided to forgo participation when the channel could have served them well in the wake of the 60 Minutes report....
It’s been a crazy couple of days for Instagram. Just yesterday the maverick social media brand updated its privacy practices and sent the entire planet into a digital uproar. Customers across the seven continents expressed outrage that Instagram would take their precious photos and leverage them to turn a profit. We broke down the fiasco in this post, but now that Instagram has apologized and retracted its new policy and the smoke has begun to clear, it’s time to break down what happened and determine what Instagram could have done better from a PR perspective....
Use social media the right way, and you can attract new customers and boost your business. Use it the wrong way, and you can spark a backlash that’ll melt your reputation to a sticky puddle. Here’s an example of the wrong way. Last September, a loyal fan of Wilcoxson’s Ice Cream posted a comment at the Montana company’s Facebookpage: “Hey saw ur cookies and cream has gelatin in it. Does it contain pork? I am a muslim and love your ice cream.” Wilcoxson’s CEO Matt Schaeffer replied: “We don’t deliver outside of Montana, certainly not Pakistan.” Oh fudge. The exchange went viral...
In crisis communications, the best practice is to notify the families of any dead people before confirming their names to the media. But is that practice becoming outdated? ...It’s not just news organizations that have traditionally honored the “wait until families are notified” rule. Imagine you’re a plant manager and that an industrial accident just claimed the lives of three of your workers. Even if you know the names of the employees, crisis communications best practices advise you to notify the families before releasing the names to help spare them the additional agony of learning about the death of their loved one through a television report.
But that Capitol Hill shooting, which took place 14 years ago, predated social media and the proliferation of blogs. So when I saw this tweet in my stream last week, it made me pause...
[Brad Phillips writes about the challenge of always-on social media ~ Jeff]
Taking on the tough job of curation... You can't trust what you find on the Internet, and you certainly can't trust what people are saying on Facebook and Twitter. That statement and the belief behind it constitute the biggest spoken obstacle to better integration of social media in crisis and emergency management, let alone communication. (I say biggest spoken reason because I think a bigger reason, not spoken, is us old folks too tired, weary, lazy and to close to retirement to have to bother with learning something as mind-bending and mentally challenging as social media seems to be for some.)
For emergency managers to use social media in major emergency response decisions, there are two major obstacles to overcome. First is the noise, second is the truth. For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to not use "social media" as a generic term, but use instead "user generated content" or UGC....
[The importance of listening and curating to find the truth in social media in an emergency. ~ Jeff] H/t to @CKSyme for flagging this post.
The social web is largely public. Yes, everything that gets shared, published, tweeted, liked, uploaded, pinned, +1’d or commented on. Everyone is now a citizen journalist, capable of sharing anything at any time. That means anyone with internet access. The web has gone mobile and so have all the users making use of the various social media channels available.
Did you know that it can take 140 characters or less to make or break a reputation in today’s digital business environment? Bad news spreads like wildfire and the days are long gone where a business that received negative feedback could wait and devise a plan before it published. If you are worried about your digital reputation or if you want to start promoting yourself on social media, having a social media crisis plan can help you when a negative comment about your brand or business snowballs online.
Here are a few tips to help you get started with your social media crisis plan...
[Crisis PR basics... ~ Jeff]
To wrap up my series on crisis response strategies, I want to revisit the beginning. Some organizations look on crisis response as sort of a fire extinguisher—something you activate when an emergency happens. Truth is you can lessen the impact of any crisis by just having the right elements in place up front. When doing research for the e-book Listen, Engage, Respond, I found that across the sectors I surveyed, the same five elements were constant. Successful organizations had them, unsuccessful (or unprepared) ones did not. Get your organization ready now. These five elements will not only help you in a crisis, but they are the best practices of organizations that use social media well on an everyday basis.... [Chris Symes' social media crisis planning tips are worth noting ~ Jeff]
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As with so many other news events, there was plenty of speculation and misinformation flowing on Twitter about the crash of an airplane at San Francisco airport — but for better or worse, that is just the way the news works now.Another breaking news event — in this case, the crash of Asiana Airlines flight 214, which broke apart while landing at San Francisco airport on Saturday morning — sparks more criticism (primarily on Twitter, of course) about how Twitter is a haven for errors and unfounded speculation, and how people seem compelled to retweet things during these events even if they have no knowledge of whether they are true or not.
To some, including regular readers of GigaOM, this won’t come as any surprise. Welcome to the way the news works now.
We saw similar criticisms and debates about the value of Twitter as a news medium during the Boston bombings, Hurricane Sandy, the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school, and pretty much every other major news event that has happened over the past several years. At some point during the action, someone will complain about how many mistakes there are circulating on Twitter, and others will argue that we should all just refrain from tweeting or retweeting anything — or perhaps just wait until later and buy a newspaper....
In 2013 there is no excuse for such failed crisis communications. Any and every company should be ready to make a public statement on any crisis in one hour or less. It is good public relations; it is good media relations; it is good crisis communication; it is good social media crisis communication. So here it is on Monday afternoon, February 18, 2013 as I sit in my office near New Orleans and Burger King’s Twitter account was hacked nearly 4 hours ago. The hackers make it look like a McDonald’s account. Burger King eventually managed to get Twitter to suspend the account and pull down the content and ugly comments. But in the 140-character world of fast news, the fast food company is SLOW to officially issue a statement....
Melissa Agnes analyzes Carnival Cruise's Crisis Communications on social media. Discover what you should absolutely take away from this case study. Though there are many aspects that I could write about regarding the way Carnival Cruises handled the management of this crisis, I’ve chosen to evaluate and analyze their social media crisis communications (go figure!). The following evaluates both Carnival Cruises Facebook and Twitter crisis communications, from beginning to end of the crisis..?
Creating concise, Twitter-friendly messaging can greatly increase the effectiveness and reach of your crisis management efforts. Today you’re more likely to catch a breaking story on Twitter than the evening news. Both professional and amateur (read: everyone else) reporters are using Twitter to share and discuss current events every minute of every day, and that’s exactly why you need to craft what social media expert Melissa Agnes called “tweet-worthy messages” in a recent blog post...
This was the week of not quite apologizing enough. Lance Armstrong appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network to explain 20 years of cheating, lying and cruel personal destruction of his truthful critics. He repeatedly said he was sorry for his conduct, but left the distinct impression that he was sorry mainly for getting caught. And his claim that he did not force his teammates into doping, among other continued denials, sounds like a crock. Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o named the supposed hoaxer who created the fake Lennay Kekua persona who e-romanced the football star before tragically dying, and even before actually living. Te'o's story can be proved or disapproved in about 5 minutes with a peek at his cell phone records, yet university officials have not been curious enough to look at them. Nor did they refute two years of false stories about the star-crossed lovers until at least a week after learning of the hoax. Yet the most shocking non-apology apology was buried in the avalanche of coverage about the disgraced athletes. The true disgrace belongs to Atlantic President M. Scott Havens, whose memo to colleagues about the magazine's ill-conceived online advertorial from the Church of Scientology fails just about every test of honesty, judgment and simple common sense.
Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/191476/the-truthiness-is-out-there.html#ixzz2IdlSIVT4
It's easy to be a Monday Morning Quarterback after reading about a company's social media crisis, but until you've dealt with a few of your own, be careful about casting the first stone. ...The truth of the matter is dealing with a social media crisis is harder than it looks. Every instance is different. And depending on the industry, the response may have to be very different as well. A consumer brand can respond in ways that a pharmaceutical company, bank or hospital cannot. The one thing that those of us who have experience dealing with these types of issues understand is that there is always more to it than meets the eye....
... Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and a plethora of smartphone apps, newsrooms now have an entirely new toolbox available to them in breaking news situations. And here’s another one to add to the kit: Banjo. Banjo is an app that describes itself as “a social discovery service.” Available for iPhone and Android users, the app collects social media updates from a variety of networks in real-time and posts them according to geo-tag. You don’t have to “check in” or even be part of a network to see other people’s updates, which are shown on a map. In January, Andy Stettler used Banjo to clarify a breaking news situation. Stettler, an assistant online editor with the Lansdale Reporter, a Pennsylvania newspaper, heard reports about a possible “bomb device” at the King of Prussia Mall. His first thought was to check social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Then he remembered to log into Banjo, which he had installed just days before....
...Because the service is relatively new and much loved by its users, who still consider it too good to be true. Because Facebook just purchased the company, and Facebook is eager for more revenue streams and has a history of pushing its privacy policy to the extremes of user acceptability. Because it was a slow news week; tech journalists had time to actually dig in to the details. They didn't need to dig too deep, either. The language in the most controversial section of the TOS -- "You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos" -- is actually pretty clear, contrary to what Instagram and its cheerleaders later claimed. You don't need a law degree to read that sentence. So the lesson is to obfuscate your TOS more? No, the lesson is that a TOS is no place to hide in the social media age. Transparency is all....
The magazine and hacktivist network criticize the photo network after says it will start sharing users' photos with advertisers. The boycott against photo sharing site Instagram just got the support of two big institutions, each spanning the spectrum of the old and new: National Geographic, and the hacktivist network Anonymous. National Geographic has posted an image on its photo feed saying it was “suspending new posts to Instagram. We are very concerned with the direction of the proposed new terms of service.” Meanwhile @YourAnonNews, the hugely-popular Twitter feed for Anonymous supporters has also encouraged people to deletetheir Instagram accounts.
Bozeman, Mont: Great place to visit. Even better place to leave? The Montana Office of Tourism has been in damage-control mode since Friday, when it posted this status update to its official Facebook page: "F this job. I just want to live in Whitefish with my future husband. Leaving Bozeman for good tomorrow. I love you with all my heart and you are not leaving me. Never. Thanks for the good times MercuryCSC!"
If that seems like a poor pitch for getting people to visit Montana, that's because it was a personal message from someone at the client's agency, MercuryCSC, meant for that person's own Facebook page. The client quickly deleted the post and then explained its origins to the press....
[Career limiting mistake by ex-agency social media manager but quick, transparent handling by the client ~ Jeff]
From Internet defamation to social media crises and one’s online reputation management, it seems that every other week a new brand is teaching us all a lesson or two in proper online conduct and social media crisis management. [Melissa Agnes shares 10 great crisis tips ~ Jeff]
Via LPM Comunicação SA
When it comes to global organizations, social media crises can be a very tricky ordeal. Find out how to protect your global company from an online attack.
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Hard to imagine making this poor judgment and social media execution.