Power of Social Media and Crisis Management
On Easter Sunday, I logged in to my Facebook account just as a random visit while waiting for a tram to go to the city. I clicked on the only notice I have got and read the message ‘Manuka has marked himself safe from Explosions in Colombo’, which made me curious (btw, Manuka is one of my ex-colleagues who used to be my companion on our daily shuttle). I clicked the linked which directed me to the below post.
I turned and went back home, and changed my plans as I do have my friends whom I knew would be in Churches on that Easter morning. Within the next hour, thanks to Whatsapp I managed to call almost all my friends and knew they were safe.
Then I logged in to Youtube and found live streams from most of the TV channels in Sri Lanka. I spent my Easter Sunday on watching the live streams, as that was the only thing I could do while stuck in Australia, 8351 kilometres away from Colombo.
Although I was wondering what is happening in Sri Lanka, as Sri Lanka did not have any such threats like bomb blasts for the past ten years and the country was in steady growth with booming tourism, this post is not about my thoughts about that. This post if about Crisis management and its link to Social Media.
What is Crisis?
According to the Oxford dictionary, ‘crisis’ is ‘a time of intense difficulty or danger’ (Oxforddictionariescom, 2019). In such a difficult situation, people do all sort of things including sane and insane activities. Chaos is the default, but then we tend to gain control over the chaos.
What is worth noticing is how social media has come into the picture in this kind of a crisis. As an example, I was completely glued to Facebook (I tried going to my friend’s profiles and send them messenger texts when I could not get them on hold on the phone) . Then I was watching CNN, BBC and Sri Lankan TV channels live streaming on Youtube.
Then I noticed one of the foreign TV channels (forgot the name) were doing live streaming just by reading out the messages from Twitter, Viber and Facebook. This show continued which made me mesmerised on how they mobilised this team to get all tweets from all Sri Lankans.
What research says?
According to research conducted by Freshfields (Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringe, 2013) 69% crisis news spreads internationally within 24 hours.
What I have experienced sitting on my couch on Easter Sunday was that (in fact it is much faster than that I had seen, it had reached almost all major NEWS channels within four hours of the incident). This social media impact has pros and cons.
On a positive note, it helps people to quickly organize, like support and humanitarian efforts. All possible channels in such a moment can be instrumental in knowing people are safe and to offer help.
However, on a negative side, this can slow down the crisis management process. What should be reported and what should not be reported are not censored in a crisis. Moreover, it should be. As an example, in mobile footage uploaded to Youtube, showed that one person was peeping into dead bodies (probably trying to recognize people) and then stepping over the dead bodies and passing to the next one, which was disturbing to watch). Rumours with negative impacts which is not based on the truth can start speculating as no one has no control over what is distributed to social channels. This can slow down crisis management efforts.
Hence any organization should know how to manage social media in a crisis. Not preparing is not an excuse. As an example, The Sri Lankan government blocked all Social Media, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp within four hours into the crisis, as an attempt to controlling the rumours.
What I wanted to point out in this post is that how to use/control social media should be part of any organization’s crisis management strategy because we are living in a digital age where bits and bytes are faster than the words coming out of the mouth.
References
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringe, 2013, Crisis management insights
