When it comes to using ‘new’ media to assist in a disaster, the Red Cross is normally ahead of the curve. In 1881 the Telegraph was used to relay disaster response communications. Fifty years later, amateur radio users helped relay disaster messages on behalf of the Red Cross across the United States. Following research commissioned in 2010 that showed over 70% of web users would expect a response via social media channels and a White Paper on The Case for Integrating Crisis Response with Social Media the American Red Cross recently announced a joint initiative with Dell in opening a Digital Operations Centre to help expand the Red Cross’s ability to engage with the public during emergencies.

Located in the Red Cross National Disaster Operations Center in Washington, D.C., the center is modeled after Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center. The primary aim of the Operations Centre is to help the Red Cross to:

• Source additional information from affected areas during emergencies to better serve those who need help;
• Spot trends and better anticipate the public’s needs; and
• Connect people with the resources they need, like food, water, shelter or even emotional support.

Perhaps even more interesting than the opening of the Operations Centre is the announcement of a digital volunteer programme to help the Red Cross during emergencies. It’s a pretty logical move for the Red Cross when you think about it. With just under 700,000 followers on twitter and over 400,000 fans on Facebook they have a pretty wide net they can throw when a disaster hits.

For more information on the Operations Centre and how it works the Red Cross have posted a video here

Given the speed at which a crisis can strike (whether it’s physical, operational or reputation based) it strikes me that an operations or command centre (even if it is just a dedicated desk) seems to be a necessity for most organisations these days.

What do you think? Should organisations maintain a dedicated social media crisis centre? Have you seen an example of an organisation using their fan base to help in times of crisis?

I was playing around with twitter settings last week and came across the Twitter Media Settings and Best Practices section on the Twitter Help Site.

Many of you have probably been spammed with content that’s not appropriate for a r/t and blocked the sender. What I found interesting in looking at the media settings was a third option I hadn’t seen previously: you can flag your own images and videos as sensitive.

Mainstream television media has, for many years, alerted viewers to a number of issues with content they are about to see. Warnings for people with photo sensitive epilepsy (normally a door step interview with lots of flash photography) to ‘some viewers may find this content disturbing’ (usually conflict or disaster related imagery) abound in news reports regarding crises.

Whilst twitter is an effective two way engagement tool the broadcast elements for a brand, emergency service or government organisation remain. I’m not entirely sure if marking content as sensitive defeats the immediacy of being able to broadcast imagery using twitter, but if time permits and you feel your audience would appreciate the ‘heads-up’ it might be something to consider.

In late March The Sunday Times ran a sting operation which uncovered a cash for access scheme (paywall) involving the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer run by the co-Treasurer of the Conservative Party, Peter Cruddas. As well as leading to the resignation of Cruddas, the article led to the Prime Minister publicly releasing details of dinners held at his private residence.

Stuart’s blog goes on to detail another attempt at a ‘sting’ from The Times this time on former Conservative PR, Ed Staite. Times journalists, claiming to be business operators asked Staite how they could go about making donations to secure access to senior politicians. It seems Staite is fairly adept at his job, so when claims surfaced that he too was offering ‘cash for access’  he was able to use twitter, his blog and copies of recommendations he’d supplied to the ‘business’ people to effectively rebut the story. The process itself makes interesting reading all of which Stuart covers in much more detail.

Whilst Staite’s response should be required reading for any PR 101 course, I thought Stuart’s observations regarding the situation were spot-on. In particular he highlights three key crisis communications lessons that can be drawn from the event.

1) Speed – Ed possibly succeeded in moving the story from the front page of the Sunday Times to a far smaller story one on the inside pages. The Sunday Times was hindered by its print publishing date while Ed was able to publish three detailed blog posts before the Sunday Times even appeared.

2) Transparency – By publishing the Sunday Times email and his response along with his new business proposal Ed has demonstrated what appears to be total transparency. In contrast, as far as I’m aware, the Sunday Times has refused to accede to Ed’s polite request to be as transparent by publishing its recordings of the meetings.

3) Every company is a media company – says Tom Foremski and Ed’s response demonstrates it. More than 20 years ago my old PR lecturer used to say “You don’t pick fights with someone who buys ink by the barrel”. Well now thanks to social media everyone has their own barrel of ink. Ed’s blog post and tweets was quickly picked up and tweeted by lots of influential people making the Sunday Times look arrogant and bit daft.

I particularly like the ‘ink by the barrel’ quote. As Stuart points out, with unfettered access to social media tools and with the right training, positioning and responsiveness, everyone has the capacity to push their own side of story.

Video streaming by Ustream

If you haven’t seen it before, Mashable published this early in 2011. There’s no better explanation for why your organisation needs to be using social media during a crisis!

An interesting article over on HuffPost this month about Lynn Peters who successfully managed to raise the alarm after her boyfriend was carjacked and then kidnapped in South Africa.

Following a number of re-tweets her request went viral and private security companies in conjunction with Riga Rescue (a volunteer-run emergency service) helped pinpoint the location of the car.

According to The West Australian there were 10,600 carjackings in South Africa last year, down from a high of 14,900 in 2008.

We’re not sure if this example shows the power of twitter in a crisis or the state of South African emergency services. Either way it seems like a good idea to keep your mobile phone charged and at the ready when driving in South Africa. You just never know when you might need to tweet…

The Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) is a ‘network-of-networks’ concept that aims to leverage digital networks to a ’21st century humanitarian response’.

It looks like a great idea and I’ve often wondered if a network that could provide a better interface between charities and humanitarian organisations and the myriad of volunteer tech networks out there might be needed.

In his post about launching the network  Andrej Verity points out that there have been:

countless instances over the past couple of years [where] traditional entities have discussed how they can engage with the digital humanitarian volunteer community. These entities are not sure of what volunteer/tech entities really exist, what services can be provided, or how to activate many of the groups.