Good morning, friends! This morning my sister and I have the honor of sharing some of our insights on crisis communication and crisis response at the International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference in Orlando, Florida! It’s nice to be in Orlando and see the sunshine - at least through the windows {I’m on a boomerang trip and won’t be around long enough to enjoy much of what Orlando has to offer, but there will definitely be other times} and it’s pretty awesome to hear what some of the major practitioners in the business have to say about crisis communication and to bounce our ideas off them!
We’re presenting on the topic of social media command centers today. Since social media’s primary function is to engage and communicate, not necessarily command {as Social Media Today outlines in this article}, it might seem like an odd choice of terms, but we feel that the social media command center serves to cross-level and integrate information during a crisis much the same way a military operations center would. Ever try to find information on something and find sixteen different hashtags, links that don’t go to updated information, bad information {remember all the photoshopped pictures being sent around during Hurricane Sandy?}, or try to contact someone and not get an answer until the “official statement” is released 24-48 hours later? Yeah. Social media command centers are supposed to alleviate some of those problems, staying on top of current topics, answering questions, making sure the right information gets sent out and it stays up-to-date, and handling crises as they appear. While they’re not GI Joe command centers necessarily, there’s a lot of similarity to how our military operations centers run – handling what they can, passing critical information up the chain of command as required, enacting early response plans and making lateral coordination as necessary.
Those are just the quick notes – I’ll post the link to the brief on our Slideshare account later, and give you some of the highlights of the conference when I get back!
