Twitter for Emergency Management & Crisis Communications

In December 2009, my friend Mike Ellis (@EmergCommNetwrk, website) posted an excerpt of Mark Prutsalis’ (@LivingPrepared, website) August 13, 2009 article Use of Twitter as an Emergency Notification Service. Both became relevant this past week when Twitter experienced serious outage issues making its site inaccessible and API unavailable.

In the article, Mark argues that government agencies should not use Twitter as an emergency notification service.  His points are valid and applicable to private sector businesses and non-profit organizations as well.

Mark, prophetically, highlights two basic concerns:

• Twitter is down frequently for a myriad of reasons, and seems particularly sensitive to capacity issues especially during high-profile, highly visible disasters and incidents, and
• Twitter has not yet fully implemented a means to validate user accounts, which diminishes the reliability of information dispersed.

Both of these concerns, fulfilling Mark’s prophecy, presented themselves beautifully in the last few weeks; most notably the above-mentioned outages and intense public out-cry over the Gulf Oil Spill (#oilspill).  Political pundits used Twitter to blast their competing parties, Gulf-area locals brought minute-by-minute updates of their experiences and BP, already suffering and PR nightmare via normal media outlets, had to contend with a fake Twitter account, @BPGlobalPR (article).  This account, that early on many believed to be the official mouthpiece of the oil giant, continues to spout inaccuracies and make outrageous, politically-motivated, reputation-damaging claims.

To be fair, BP’s real Twitter account is @BP_America.

It is important to distinguish between two different, yet relevant and interrelated, concepts:  emergency communications and crisis communications.  The former deals specifically with dispersing critical information to affected parties and/or to response and relief personnel in the field.  The latter, as a sub-specialty of public relations, deals with protecting public perception of an organization and to defend its reputation.

Participating in the live reporting and re-tweeting of event information does not make the social network expert in emergency and disaster management.

- Mark Prutsalis

While Mark’s argument deals specifically with government agencies and emergency management, the BP fiasco demonstrates how Twitter’s shortcomings should make private-sector organizations think twice about using social media for emergency notifications and communications.  It should further highlight the need for addressing, in a formal crisis management strategy developed long before it’s needed, if and how social media will be used  as a crisis management and communications tool.

Twitter apologists and social media marketing experts argue that no one is urging companies to use Twitter exclusively, but only to integrate it into their crisis communications along with other tools and services.  To some extent, this is true.   However, rather than promoting its use, the crisis management plan should specifically detail how Twitter and other social networking platforms will be used and, more importantly, NOT used during an incident.  For example, Twitter should not be relied upon to deliver authoritative quotations or official comments, but instead point to and promote an official website where the reader can find press releases, status updates and other relevant information.  Even so, there is a danger of the public becoming overly dependent on Twitter status updates for these links. Hence, it is important to integrate social media to supplement the organization’s overall communications strategy, not to replace it nor even as a critical component.

Marketing, in general, and crises, specifically, require control of ‘the message’.  Unfortunately for most organizations in today’s connected world, as we saw recently with Tiger Woods, Toyota and BP, controlling that message is not easy.  Gaining control of that message after-the-fact is nearly impossible.  Organizations must take steps today to develop their emergency and crisis management strategies and  to clarify internally and to their customers how official information will be distributed.  And while Twitter may have a role in some organizations’ strategies, it should be limited to supplementing other methods and delivery mediums over which the organization has control.