Social Media Rules of Engagement

Why Your Online Narrative is the Best Weapon During a Crisis

Nicole Matejic

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780730322252
• eBook ISBN: 9780730322269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Avoid becoming a #PRFail with a solid social media strategy

Social Media Rules of Engagement guides you in the development of a bullet-proof social media strategy. You can manage any crisis effectively by having a plan before you actually need one—and by understanding and influencing your audience with military precision. This original, engaging, and informative text with case studies from the coalface offers you the tools you need to avoid scandal and media crises, and to learn how to leverage social media, big data, and influence in your communications strategies.

Social media has established itself as a critical part of any external communications strategy—but the very nature of social media leads to crises that organisations are not always prepared to face. To execute an effective social media strategy, you need to build influence, while leveraging the data that supports a targeted approach. This innovative guide focuses on how to create a holistic social media strategy, and how to defend your organization from social media crisis.

• Develop a risk management strategy that protects your social media interactions around the clock
• Avoid common mistakes by reading case studies of business faux pas—and learning exactly what not to do in a crisis
• Cultivate influence both in the boardroom and on the information battlefield by defining your story and knowing your audience segments
• Leverage digital interactivity features to enrich the content in the book

Social Media Rules of Engagement is an integral resource to guide your social strategy toward success.

PART I
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

1
Social media crisis communications:
a seismic shift in the risk profile

I was a child of the digital revolution. By the time I started my undergraduate degree in 1998, the bleeps and pings that were dial-up internet had already started to change the way people communicated.

Email had to be checked ‘at least a few times a week’; web pages were a revelation of slow-loading information; and the move to digital photography was an incredible disruption to how we had traditionally captured moments in time.

By the time I was working as a surveillance operative just a few years later, the legal minefield of the digital revolution saw governments racing to update their legislation in an effort to keep up with digital consumerism (and hedonism) as digital devices were used for an ever wider range of legal and, of course, illicit purposes.

The other race being run in the digital revolution was the race to break news. With the print news media’s first forays into online news, photojournalists became pseudo-reporters and websites became adjunct news services.

I often refer to the early noughties as a time when the global population developed their information-crack addiction. We just couldn’t get enough. Technology-possessed people were like disciples waiting for the Second Coming. Our new temple was the internet and within it we were chasing the digital messiah like junkies chasing the dragon.

From the first digital testament and revelations of Alta Vista and Netscape then Yahoo, Google and Bing, to the second digital testament and revelations of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn … search and social networking have become our modern-day prophets, heralding in a seismic change in the way we communicate, connect and share.

Imagine the relative simplicity of being a crisis communicator before the early noughties, when print news ran to editorial deadlines that could span days and photographs took hours to be developed and printed. If the evening news wanted a story they had to send out a news truck with a reporter and camera crew, and getting hold of the videotape after the story had aired was another challenge entirely.

After the newspapers had run their stories of scandal they became tomorrow’s fish and chip paper. Radio, feeding off the print news media, was perhaps the biggest antagonist in a crisis because of their inherently short production lead times. In making stories ‘newsworthy’ they directly influenced how long a crisis could be sustained, and talkback radio gave a voice to the unheard.

Can you imagine the luxury of such an uncomplicated, 9 to 5 professional life?

No blinking Blackberry or iPhone chimes to monitor. No tweets, posts or surprise YouTube embarrassments. No bloggers, citizen journalists or armchair generals to offer their opinions.

While the digital revolution changed the way we communicate, the times they keep on a-changing. The what-next mentality now feeds the consumer technology product cycle from one device to its upgrade and beyond. Can you think of a single aspect of your life that isn’t touched by digital or social media in some way?

In the race for the next news fix to feed a global population of information addicts, the digital revolution has not come without its challenges for communicators.

Our audiences are now hungrier for information that ever before.

• They want to digest it quickly, concisely and in real time.
• Their bullshit meter is well developed.
• They have a voice.
• They have influence.
• They don’t need the news media to generate news.

Crises have gone from largely contained events to broadly uncontainable disasters that might have been preventable but are now impossible to erase.

This seismic shift in the organisational risk profile didn’t occur as a by-product of the digital revolution; it occurred because organisations failed to keep pace with the rate of digital consumerism. While children of the revolution were all worshipping at the temple of the internet, organisations were still conducting business like it was 1979.

As organisations waited (some are still waiting) for the social media ‘fad’ to pass, they failed to innovate. They resisted changes to the way they needed to communicate. They lost sight of the moving target that was their audience: their customers, their staff and their shareholders.

Strategic communications foresight was traded in for crisis communications hindsight; and in the rush to recover lost communications ground, they found their savvy digital competitors and adversaries had already lapped them in the race for online influence.

Cue the modern-day crisis communicator. With an iPad in one hand, a smartphone at their ear and their next tweet at the top of their mind, crisis communicators now arm themselves with the very technology, knowledge and socially savvy skills organisations are only beginning to realise was the future over a decade ago.

These children of the revolution are redefining the way crises are managed, wars are fought and perceptions defended. They are redefining organisational communications — one social media disaster at a time.

Communications born again, but the fundamentals still apply

Ask any bartender: a martini is still a martini whether it’s shaken or stirred. It may taste just a little different, but it’s still made of the same ingredients.

Communication as a profession is no different. While the digital revolution has changed the way we consume information, during a crisis a communicator’s ability to communicate remains critical.

Whatever type of organisation they find their desk in, crisis communicators need to recognise that in the past decade the way the population has been primed to consume information has fundamentally changed. This makes how we communicate just as important as what we communicate during times of crisis.

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How we communicate is just as important as what we communicate during times of crisis #SMROE

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Far from broadcasting into the depths of cyberspace hoping to make first contact, if you are communicating online, someone is listening. In fact, more people than you could ever imagine are tuning in to brand you.

Perhaps one of the biggest paradigm shifts arising from the digital revolution is that crisis communications is no longer just a war of words. The online and social media battlefield is now a whirlpool of text, urban slang, video imagery, animation, infographics, presentations and instant messaging.

Do you know your LOLs from your lulz? Your tweet from your post? Your Snapchat from your Viber?

Communicating with a clear purpose, in ways and places you will be heard, is the only way to connect with and influence an audience.

The art of listening and engagement has never been more important.

There is no hiding offline; with or without you, people are talking about your organisation online and on social media. From your customers, clients, shareholders, employees and the government, through to potential clients, competitors and prosp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Author note
• Preface
• PART I RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
• PART II THE PLAN IS TO HAVE A PLAN BEFORE YOU NEED A PLAN
• #PayItForward
• Index
• Advert
• EULA