Ryan Anderson dot ca

Crisis preparedness has always been an important part of communications, but it’s especially so now that practically every employee, customer and competitor has access to a global publishing platform.  But even those companies who have been through the planning and training may be left completely unprepared in times of a real crisis if they’re not ready for a completely different communications  landscape.

So, when did you last update your crisis plan?  If it’s more than three years ago, then chances are that it’s woefully out of date.  Think back to 2006.  Facebook was only beginning to gain popularity.  Twitter hadn’t even seen the light of day.  YouTube had not yet been acquired by Google, and there were still those predicting its failure.

Now, look at the landscape today.  News is breaking through Twitter long before it reaches the cable news networks.  Online video is one of the most popular online activities, with dozens of video sharing sites now occupying the space that was predicted to be a non-entity.

Time has always been of the essence when it comes to responding to a crisis, but that time window has been cut dramatically shorter in the past few years.  The fundamentals still apply, but we have an entirely new toolset at our disposal, and if your crisis preparedness plan still focuses on dealing solely with the mainstream media, you’re ignoring a major channel that has the potential to turn even the smallest spark into a wildfire.

Things have changed dramatically in the last half of the decade.  Crisis preparedness is no longer simply a phone tree and a dark site – it’s an entire playbook that needs to be rehearsed and refined in order to communicate effectively in times of crisis.  The messages may not have changed, but the process has, and missing that fact is a huge communications failure.

Social media isn’t for every organization, I’ll admit.  However, for any organization where crisis preparedness is crucial (which is most), social media absolutely needs to be considered.  News spreads through social media, and it spreads at an alarming speed.  Consider the US Airways flight that crashed into the Hudson river, and the fact that the first photos were seen on Twitter only 10 minutes after takeoff.  The time for dismissing social media as a niche activity is over.  You can only ignore a raging river to the point where it sweeps you into the ocean.

We call Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and the like “online communities,” but many people find that label hard to swallow.  After all, communities care for one another, support each other and are brought together by something deeper than shared interests or geography.

If nothing else was going to convince you that these services are more than just tools, and that your “friends” are more than just connections in a network, The success of Twestival would have to do it.  If you haven’t heard of it yet, Twestival is a world-wide charitable collaboration for charity:water, a charity that is dedicated to digging wells in developing parts of the world with no access to clean water.  There’s one in your city.  Seriously – go look.

Building one well can cost between $4,000 and $12,000, so it’s not an inexpensive endeavour.  So, rather than paying for expensive television ads, or paying people to stand on the street with binders, charity:water took to the web, and organized a global, one-day event in support of their cause that brought over 185 organizers together from every continent around the world to donate their time and money to raise funds for a single charity.

So far, they’ve raised $1,000,000, and the event isn’t until Thursday.

I’m involved with the Ottawa event, as is @bitpakkit and @sassymonkey from Overlay.TV (the event’s sponsor), and @kevinwaghorn – the producer of the Ottawa Fringe Festival, and a wicked event manager locally. What I’ve seen in the few short weeks we’ve been working on this is the dedication of both the local and global Twitter community to give of their time, their money and their influence, simply because it was a cause they could believe in.

Multiply that by 185 cities around the world, and you see the real power of social networking.  The building of connections that would be impossible through any medium we’ve ever seen – television, advertising, telephone – not even the internet in and of itself.  What it took to connect the world was 140 characters and a cause.  Next time someone asks you what the point of Twitter is, you’ve got an answer for them.

If you’re in Ottawa, the event is February 12 at Suite 34 in the Market. Details are at http://ottawa.twestival.com, and you can buy tickets at http://www.amiando.com/twestivalottawa.html.  If you can’t come, please spread the word, tell some friends, donate something to the silent auction – any little bit helps.  I don’t take the word community lightly, but I hope you will join ours in making the world a little better place.

Regardless of the field you work or live in, ignorance of what you do or the community you participate is maddening, depressing and disheartening.  It’s what causes rifts in organizations, and is why communicators don’t get along with lawyers, why creatives don’t get along with suits, and why engineers don’t get along with… well, anyone.

Even more infuriating than ignorance, however, is when that ignorance is coupled with opinion and backed up with insistence.  For some reason, I’ve been coming across this type of person more often recently.  Any rational argument I could respond to with examples or statistics, but the ignorant insister doesn’t deal in such sundry as data and proof.  This is the type of person whose line of argument is based on unsupported opinion and anecdote.

“Social media doesn’t work.”

This phrase is like nails on a blackboard to me, because it’s the first warning that I’m going to have to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about the thing that they want to argue about.

Usually, when I dig deeper as to the meaning behind this broad generalized statement, that lack of understanding comes out very quickly.  First of all, to say that social media “doesn’t work” shows that they’ve already missed the point, fully and completely.  Social media works by virtue of the fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading it – that I’m connected with like-minded people on Twitter and that I make plans with friends on Facebook.  What they mean to say, of course, is that social media isn’t an effective way of creating value for a company, and once I can guide them to this much more rational thought, it’s much easier to point out why they’re wrong.

More often than not, their reasoning is based on one of two things.  Either a) they don’t use social media, and therefore believe that no one else does, or b) they’ve heard people complain about being spammed on Facebook or something of the like, and have extrapolated that to mean that everyone hates every kind of social media campaign through any technology.

As social media “early adopters,” it is, of course, our duty to educate others on community, technology and the culture that pervades it, but sometimes, when faced with a case like the ones I’m describing, it’s best just to walk away.  Sadly, I lack whatever gene it is that would allow me to walk away from a baseless argument, and it causes me to engage in more angering conversations than I care to admit.  Call it a character flaw.

In many way, these arguments are like someone who walked through Chinatown in the summer on garbage day and then spent the rest of his life convinced that the Chinese are “a smelly people.”  As human beings, it’s in our nature to make snap judgements based on little information.  If cro-magnon man spent too much time wondering if the sabre tooth tiger was an enemy or a friendly kitty we probably wouldn’t have made the cut for natural selection.

Of course, it goes both ways.  Assuming that a social approach is key for every business because of your own personal success or affinity for blogging is of equal ignorance.  The wise man knows what he does not know.  The people I have the most respect for are those who admit their lack of knowledge and approach social media from a neutral standpoint and a desire to learn.  They will be successful because they don’t come into something they don’t understand with preconceived notions, and can therefore be objective about how to integrate social media into their business practices, if they do at all.

Both obstinance and zealotry are dangerous traits, and both are derived from ignorance.  Be wary of both, in yourself and others, and you’ll have a better chance of arriving at “understanding” with whatever you do.

One of the core components of any strategic plan is the situation analysis.  It’s the calibration phase of the communications planning process, and forces a methodical documentation of what’s what, both within the company and in the environment it is operating in.  For a startup, the most important consideration is the state of its resources – without resources, the environment doesn’t even enter into the equation.

Of course, the word “resources” doesn’t always mean cold, hard cash.  It takes into consideration the people, the infrastructure, the intellectual property and everything else that it takes to run that business.  Much like a car needs gas, oil and fluids to run properly, a company needs to think of all of these resources.  Running out of one can lead to serious damage.  The problem is, with all of the fixation on sales and the bottom line, many young companies don’t even think of a key resource that is often one of the most important.  That resource is good will.

To an aggressively sales-driven organization, good will probably sounds like more hairy-fairy pseudo business strategy, but in some cases, good will is the sole reason for the success of a company.  Even the most well-funded companies and services can still fail if they run out of good will.

The most heartbreakingly obvious example of this is Twitter.  Here you have a company that has built a technology that, for all intents and purposes, does nothing – it’s merely a system that allows 140-character messages to be passed into a database and then redistributed.  The early popularity of the service caused a small group of passionate users to evangelize the platform, and a small group of passionate developers to create websites, tools and toys that utilized the Twitter API.  For the past month or so, Twitter has gasped under the pressure of its own popularity, causing many users, myself included, to wonder about the future of the service.

Twitter has reportedly closed close to $15 million in financing, and by all accounts, is strong financial shape.  But that’s not their problem.  Their constant downtime and lack of transparency about it has drained a lot of the good will that made it so popular.  If that wasn’t enough, they were also hit by a small firestorm when Ariel Waldman accused them of not upholding their TOS after receiving a number of hostile, threatening messages on Twitter and getting no resolution from the company, and another when they were accused of blaming their biggest users for the downtime.

Like any business on the web, Twitter faces a lot of competition and the reality that if a significant enough portion of its users migrates to another system, the rest will follow suit.  No amount of VC funding will fix that problem.

In a recent interview with Robert Scoble, one of the users that Twitter was thought to be blaming for its flaky service, founder Ev Williams said “The fact that people are frustrated is a sign that we built something people care about.”

People really do care about Twitter.  It has one of the strongest communities of any business I’ve seen, but throwing away that good will with constant unexplained downtime and unreliable service is as dumb as burning investment money to heat your office. To its credit, Twitter has recently started being more transparent with development issues and downtime, but to most of the community who have come to depend on Twitter as a communications channel, that’s of little consequence.

As of right now, the company has not yet depleated its resources of good will.  Many members of the community regard the downtime with good spirits, referring to the graphic above as the “FAIL WHALE,” or posting spoofs of Twitter’s all-too-familiar “something is technically wrong” images.  The reality is, however, that this good will will only last so long, and then, without warning, Twitter’s loyal and influential fan base will move on to something more reliable – Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk or any other number of ridiculously-named microblogging services that come out in the next couple of weeks.

The lesson here is not really about what Twitter should have done or could do, but their story certainly serves as a cautionary tale.  Small businesses depend on community.  If, as Gary Vaynerchuk says, you’re lucky enough to make one person care about who you are and what you have to say, you’ve been given a gift.  If you’re stupid enough to ignore that gift of goodwill and assume it will always be there, no amount of strategic planning is going to save your business.

There’s been some debate in the social media PR world recently about whether or not we can really profess to advise clients on reaching clients through social media if we ourselves are not on the bleeding edge.  Specifically the question being asked was “do we need to be on Twitter in order to be effective PR people.”

I’m of two minds on this.  On one hand, there are plenty of PR people who have far more knowledge about the profession than I that are not on Twitter.  Does that make me better than them?  No, but it does mean that I understand an increasingly important side of public relations on a level that they can’t achieve from anecdotal accounts of what it is and how to use it.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t trust an electrician who didn’t have lights in his house… why should I expect clients to trust my opinion on a specific aspect of social media if I’ve only ever heard about it and visited the “about” page?

As I’ve said before, PR isn’t about the tools, but the new tools that are available to us every day of the week are changing the game so drastically that if we’re not on top of what’s happening in that arena, there’s no way we can be expected to provide our clients with a full understanding of the environment their brand is operating in, and that means either missing opportunities that would have been a perfect fit, or convincing them to throw money at everything that sparkles along the way.  Either way, the client loses.

It doesn’t mean that we have to spend our entire day on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Second Life or whatever the next big thing that comes out tomorrow happens to be, but it is our responsibility to at least engage with these communities, assess the tool fairly, and understand how it will affect current and potential clients.  Otherwise, we’re trying to fix the wiring while we’re working in the dark.

Bonus link: Todd Defren’s excellent post on why PR folk should be using Twitter.

As marketers, it’s easy to lose perspective on how the content we create affects the people we are talking to.  In many ways, we’ve been trained not to even think about it and view marketing as the unwritten contract price of media subsidization.  The old way of thinking is that we create ads, and the audience owes it to us to watch our ad as payment for the show they’re watching or the article they’re reading.

In reality, the consumer owes us nothing – quite the opposite.  Great marketers get that, and build their marketing, or better, their business, around the idea of giving something back to the user.  The question becomes – what is the role of the marketer in creating content?  We used to be the host of the party, who would, in exchange for the invitation, spend 20% of the time publicly patting ourselves on the back.  Now, that role has changed, and many interactive marketers moved to creating destination sites or social networks based around their brand.

Before making strategic or creative decisions, you need to decide this interaction.  Most brands want to create the playground – a social network, a virtual world.  They put up a few swings and a see-saw, and expect the world to come and play.  The problem is that a playground is only as much fun as the equipment within it, so other companies make the jungle gym, but put it in an out of the way place that requires people to go out of their way to get their, assuming that their content will attract people far and wide.

These tactics have some validity and can work occasionally.  But the most strategic marketers combine the playground and the jungle gym together, and provide the tools to the community to make it what they want, rather than prescribing the experience for them.

Twitter is an interesting example of this.  On its own, Twitter is nothing at all – an empty, unlandscaped lot.  The reason that they’ve been successful where other, similar but more complicated services have failed is because they gave the community the tools to build the lot into whatever they wanted.  Through the Twitter API, the community created desktop and mobile clients, games, competitions, visualizers, tools and much more.  As a result, the playground is owned by the community because it was built by them.

As marketers, the best thing we can ask for is to have consumers interact with our brand in a meaningful way.  What we have to realize as we transition into a new phase of communications is that we can create playgrounds or we can create jungle gyms, but it’s the community that’s going to be what decides if it’s worth playing in.

I’ve made it no secret that I’m a big fan of Twitter.  Being instantly connected to a large number of people I consider intelligent and interesting whether I’m at my computer or on my Blackberry is an incredible thing.  I’ve asked and answered questions, looked for help and helped others and have connected people and arranged gatherings.  It’s the one tool I didn’t know I needed until I had it.

One of the things that always bothered me, though, was the fact that I missed so much of the conversation because I was doing unimportant things like sleeping, working, or having (God forbid) analogue conversations in the real world.  Not that I really need to know every time Jason Calacanis walks his dogs, but since so many of the people I follow use Twitter as a way to spread news and share links, it felt like I was missing some quality conversation.

So, I asked for help.  How can I subscribe to an RSS feed of just those posts where my friends are sharing links?  Within two minutes, @kaziel, a web developer from Mexico City, answered my question and sent me a link to a custom Yahoo! Pipes page that did just that.  I was able to tweak it to work with my own feed, and now I can get those Twittered URLs directly into my RSS feed, and effectively outsource my blog reading to people much smarter and more diverse than I.

To me, this is a testament to the open philosophy of social media and those I follow, and As Mike Sansone of ConverStations points out, this is a great first step in getting more signal out of Twitter.  It’s a pretty easy little trick, and you can clone the pipe right from mine, but if you need a little coaching, Mike’s got a pretty good explanation of how to make it work.

I’ve got a lot of geeky friends. In fact, most of my friends are a geek in some way, shape or form. They’re programmers and designers, but they’re also music geeks, theatre geeks, language geeks, running geeks, media geeks and so on, and for the most part, it’s a big part of why I enjoy being around them. They go out of their way to make themselves into experts in something, whether it’s completely esoteric or utterly practical. It will come as no shock to anyone who has ever met me that I’m a geek too – and it makes me a much better PR guy.

Being good at PR or marketing requires a thirst for knowledge that I would consider above the average. It means more than just knowing how to do your job – it means knowing about technology, about history, about the media, about sociology and a million other tiny little pieces before you can really create anything that comes close to resembling a “strategy.”

Consider the game of chess. A very simple game, but one that requires an intimate knowledge of not only the rules, but the intricacies of the pieces. To be any good at chess means a lot more that just knowing that bishops move diagonally and pawns only move forward – it takes knowing how each of the pieces relates to one another, and how all of the individual pieces comes together to make something much stronger than they are individually.

It’s said quite often that public relations, marketing or advertising is “not about the tools.” That’s a fair statement, but at a much higher level, the profession requires such an intense mastery of the tools – especially when it comes to social media – that it’s not sufficient just to have a textbook understanding of the tools. In order to be a grandmaster, you have to experience them on a level that cannot be read or explained. That’s where being a geek comes in, and that thirst for knowledge and personal depth – no matter how obscure interacting on Twitter or maintaining a podcast may seem to friends outside the industry – becomes a point of differentiation between “practitioner” and “expert.”

For those who are new to the industry, or trying to break in – your best investment in yourself, and ultimately your future tax bracket, is to be a geek. Dedicate yourself to learning about the whole, but spend the extra time understanding each of those moving parts. Your friends might think you’re a bit odd, but the benefit you provide to a future employer will be well worth it.

When noise first started being made about Twitter, I immediately dismissed it as a nonsensical waste of time that only the geekiest of social media geeks could ever love.  Finally, I gave in to all the talk about microblogging and figured that if I should at least try it before clients started asking me about it.  I figured I would give it a chance for a month and see where it went from there.  I have to say… I’m a convert, and have been evangelizing it to many people for the past few weeks.  These are just some of the reasons I think it’s worth at least trying:

1. The connection is much more genuine.  I’ve found that it’s very hard to get a sense of who someone is by their blog.  There’s a certain amount you can tell about their sense of humour, but in most cases, people have blogging personas.  With Twitter, the combination of the profound and the banal leads to a much more personal connection with the people in your network.  It’s not as personal as IM, of course, but it’s as personal as a public conversation is ever going to be.
2. It has a low barrier to entry.  I don’t know about you, but writing blog posts takes me a long time.  There are times when I have a lot to say, but cannot bring myself to write it down.  There are other times when I have something to share, but don’t feel that it warrants a blog post.  Because it’s easy to produce and consume, Twitter is an ideal forum for these situations.
3. It’s easy to connect.  I have a lot of respect for far more bloggers than I can realistically read in one day.  Connection also has a low barrier to entry, and unlike subscribing to yet another RSS feed, it’s easy to deal with the content, since it only comes at you 140 characters at a time.
4. It’s a persistent connection to your social graph.  I’m connected via blog only when I’m writing or have my nose in my feed reader, which, depending on how many of those pesky clients want me to earn my day rate, can be very little.  The fact that it is tied into your mobile phone, via SMS or data, allows me to keep on top of things on the road, driving down the highway or waiting to be pried out of a smoldering car wreck caused by Tweeting while driving down the highway.
5. News travels fast.  Thanks to being connected to extremely plugged-in individuals and those who live-tweet events, I’ve found out about a number of things I’m interested in before they even hit the web.  In reality, does it matter if you don’t find out about who’s buying Livejournal for another 10 minutes?  Probably not, but it’s one of the most efficient social news networks I’ve ever seen.
6. There’s a real community.  I’ve asked for help and I’ve helped people who asked.  The blogosphere has that vibe too, but there’s less of a chance that someone is going to ask for help via their blog.  Before I left for Singapore, I asked via Twitter if anyone had any tips for presenting to an Asian audience.  Shel Israel emailed me a few minutes later to introduce me to Jeremiah who gave some invaluable advice and James Seng, who I met and had an excellent talk with when I was there.  This probably says more about Shel being an exceptionally nice guy than it does about Twitter, but this is but one example of many.

Within a few weeks of using the service, Twitter had already become one of the most powerful connection tools I used, and continues to be useful.  Certainly, it has its downfalls – the ease of posting has made me lazy about blogging regularly (which Brendan was quick to chastise me for at Third Tuesday) and if not properly managed, it can become an honest-to-goodness time sucker.

I honestly believe after my experience that if you haven’t given Twitter (or microblogging in general) a chance, you haven’t really joined the conversation.  The motto of the blogosphere is about conversation, but it’s not really suited to honest-to-goodness conversation.  We write blog posts like articles, and the responses, either in comments or in the echo chamber are time-consuming to keep track of.  There is a real conversation going on within the Twitter community that includes blogs, photos and everything else – and is inherently a dialogue rather than monologue with some follow-up.

If it helps, just think of it as a persistent chat room that’s invite only and completely public.

Bonus links:  What the Web strategist should know about Twitter.