Roberta J. WittySocial media can be a great boon during a crisis for personal purposes. Just today I heard of a Haitian teenager who sent a text message to her aunt (I believe in the US) saying that she was alive but without a home. This text message could save her life as support organizations were notified and started to take action in finding the girl.
But does social media help or hurt private enterprises and governments and their partners during a crisis? On the positive side, you get direct input from many quarters – those directly involved in the event and those not. On the negative side, you have no way of validating the information sent on social media forums and some posts may actually harm the enterprise or hinder rescue efforts –panic can ensue based on false information, or comments may wrongly harm the reputation of the enterprise.
As many of my colleagues have stated: social media is here to stay – enterprises need to get over it and start embracing it their operations. But how does one do that during a crisis? One immediate action that enterprises need to do is set up a social media monitoring program as part of a BCM program. False or inaccurate comments can be immediately refuted so that problems are not created. Another action is to make social media forums an endpoint in your emergency notification process – not only send crisis communiqués by voice message, email and text, but post these messages to enterprise-sanctioned social media forums.
How is your organization embracing social media in the BCM program? What are examples of how your organization has been successful in doing so?
Category: BCM and IT DRM Research Coverage Tags: Availability Risk, BCM, Business Continuity Management, Business Continuity Planning, Business Resiliency, Continuity of Operations, Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Notification, Emergency Preparedness, Incident Management, Operational Risk Management, Recovery Planning, Resiliency, Risk Assessment
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