I’m sharing more and more of my work on this blog than I ever intended to, but I can’t help it – I get so excited about some of the great projects I’m working on that I just have to share! Hence the “Art & Science” you see above 
A couple days ago, Karen and I were panelists a Firestorm Solutions webinar to discuss our research on social media command centers. We presented this research at the International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference in Florida this past March, and that’s where we met Jim Satterfield and Karen Masullo. We were extremely excited to have the opportunity to present to Firestorm’s wonderfully diverse audience {we had about 130 people from six continents!}, and we really enjoyed the discussion.
Firestorm Solutions was kind enough to record and share the full webinar presentation, so if you’re interested in different ways to use and monitor social media in a crisis situation, here it is:
Many businesses and brands struggle with good ways to use social media. Social media is becoming a larger and larger percentage of the channels we use to communicate, and brands cannot afford to ignore or miss the key discussions, indicators of issues, and discussions of brand identity and reputation that happen there. More and more brands are setting up large communication hubs to monitor social media activity and conversations, but so far, no one has really written anything definitive about what functions these hubs are supposed to perform, and how we could tell if they were doing what they were supposed to do properly or not.
Metrics and assessments are a particular area of interest for me. It might sound dull, but it’s really hard to tell whether or not something is working the way you want it to or not if you’re not measuring the right outcomes! Karen and I combed through the literature and talked to a multitude of practitioners, and finally came up with a list of functions what we called social media command centers were supposed to perform. Then we assigned objectives to the functions that, when measured against the scales we developed for them, would give us a quantitative idea of how well our social media command center was doing.
We converted the overall model into a set of best practices that anyone, from small businesses to large brands, can use to make sure they’re on board with social media conversations, whether in a crisis or not.
We had a terrific time blending our respective areas on this project – it was an exciting project, and it’s also been a lot of fun for me to be able to work with my family members on research projects. We are the family that researches together – it makes for a lot of nerdiness during the holidays, but it’s been terrific fun to collaborate. Our next family research event is in Washington D.C., where we’ll be presenting at the Association for Psychological Science Convention.
I want to thank my sister and wonderful collaborator Karen for including me on so many fun projects, and also Jim and Karen of Firestorm Solutions for making this webinar happen! We’re hopefully going to be able to join forces again after Karen and I present our reputation management research in Barcelona this summer, and I can’t wait!
