Social Media & Crisis Communications

Everyone is feeling around this topic in the wake of US Airways 1549 ditching in the Hudson River. The first images of the plane in the water came from a Twitter post. Word spread like wildfire across social media platforms. People asked for details over Twitter and people with the information responded.

How a company responds to a crisis is changing because of social media. But just as important as what’s changing is what’s not changing. The need to deliver information about an incident fast is still there. The need to focus on the right audience in a crisis is still there. You still need to have a crisis plan and you need to practice that plan as realistically as possible.

I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come, but companies still have to be good at the fundamentals of crisis communications even as they adapt to new means of information transmission.