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CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Social media tools are ideal for communicating during unpredictable situations. Their universality and flexibility have been seen to be effective in numerous global disasters. You can learn to use them for crisis management too.
Various worldwide disasters, from the tsunami in the Indian Ocean to the flooding in Louisiana, showed a whole new way to respond to crises. The ability to set up blogs and wikis using free web tools had never been put to this use before and we marvelled at the role they played in helping people find information and support while the official systems struggled to get going and have relevance. This is because when things are out of control you can’t always guarantee that the right person with the right role and the right permissions gets to the right system at the right time. Attempts to take an official position hamper the ability to react. In contrast, individuals on the web, able to flock around tools like wikis, can easily contribute what they know and collectively work out what is happening and what to do about it.
It has always struck me as odd that we try to plan for the unpredictable which, by its very nature, is hard to predict. We build systems based on rigid procedures and roles and imagine that the next thing to go wrong is going to be pretty much like the last. Disaster recovery systems assign roles and responsibilities before the event and our technology then creates rigid information flows. These measures are meant to ...
