Suggested Guidelines for Crisis Communication and Social Media

Social internet media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) need to be treated as an organic and integral part of an organization’s media strategy. The internet feeds on information, and the worst thing an organization can do in that environment—as with traditional media outlets—is to go silent during periods of crisis or uncertainty. The information needs to keep flowing, even if the information is “We’re still working on an answer.” Public affairs, marketing, and/or outreach personnel need to be kept in the loop as subject matter experts and advisors for handling public perception, regardless of the nature of the crisis or uncertainty surrounding it.


In addition to external communications, extra thought also needs to be given to internal communications—what you are saying to your employees. The best thing you can do is to instill a feeling that “We’re all in this together.” The best way to do that is to keep your employees as informed as you can about what is being done to address the crisis at hand and let them be your organization’s advocates out in the social media world. If you cannot divulge the specific decisions being discussed, then you need to at least explain what the process is—what some of the factors are that must guide your decisions, and how long you expect the process to take. Again, responsible transparency goes a long way toward building trust, both internally and externally.


Lastly, it is important that employees understand their rights and freedoms regarding social media: what can they say? Where can they say it? What can they do to help the organization during this period of crisis? Obviously they must follow guidelines regarding the use of information technology resources and company time, but once they’re on their own, they should be made to feel empowered to be advocates for the organization. By emphasizing what employees cannot do or say, you open the door to passive-aggressive behavior, as employees get the impression that they cannot say anything. And in this new media environment, even the impression of inadvertently or blatantly suppressing personal opinions produces two negative effects: it makes your organization look like it is trying to cover things up and that you are being tyrannical over your employees’ free speech rights.


It is very easy to share good news and progress on the internet when things are going well. The true test of an organization’s public communications on the internet is when things are not going well but the need for information continues. Silence is no longer an option.

The FTC to Clamp Down On Bloggers

So it begins: the Federal Trade Commission will now regulate bloggers to the extent that bloggers will soon be required to state whether they are on the payroll of any product they review. I wonder if the same rules will apply to "grassroots" political supporters--e.g., when you start blathering about the evils of Limbaugh or Obama, will you have to admit that you're also working for some political organization? The slope is slippery indeed, depending on how civil courts and regulators decide to interpret this rule.

The Lost High Road

Somewhere along the line, I picked up a love of philosophy and political rhetoric. However, these interests have a particular flavor. It is the flavor of highfalutin' words, clear reasoning, and incisive criticism of an opponent's positions. That is to say, the academic study of politics, not necessarily politics as it is practiced today. Mind you, classical references to the Greeks or the Romans can still be heard from our legislators in the late hours on C-SPAN. And at least on the surface, American politics is about ideas regarding how the government should behave and how people should live their lives. However, in regular practice, thanks to the television, the 24-hour news cycle, and the irrational belief that "the personal is political," American representative government has strayed a long way from the Greek or Roman forms of rhetoric and politics.

Father Dan suggests that such ideas are passé, naive, or both. And it's a pity, really, because with no serious rivals left, and with our unchallenged military, economic, and social leadership in the world, one would like to think that a nation with serious responsibilities would have a serious political discourse to match. Alas, one would be thinking wrongly to assume such a thing.

A friend of mine tried to convince me a dozen years ago that "philosophy has nothing to do with politics." I was offended by her statement, and refused to believe it. After all, the political fights of this generation and those that went on before HAVE dealt with the behavior of government and its relationship with the people. One would like to think that there was something behind it besides gossip, innuendo, and trashy insults. However, the longer I read and hear the nation's political theater, the more depressed I get because it appears that my friend is almost right.

Almost right, that is, because there IS a philosophy at work in American politics, and that philosophy can be expressed as follows: "If you do not like the political ideas of your opponents, you must constantly and relentlessly attack their character, truthfully or not, to undermine their credibility and ability to campaign or govern."

Note that this has nothing to do with the merits of your opponent's positions, or the possible outcomes of those positions--which should be more important--but those are irrelevant. Your enemy is EVIL because they belong to a different party. They oppose what YOU believe, and therefore they must be DESTROYED by any means necessary--lies, cheap shots, or dirty laundry that has little to nothing to do with how smart their political ideas are.

The latest victim of this "philosophy" is Sarah Palin, who has decided to leave the Alaska governorship after a vicious presidential campaign and the aftereffects thereof. She's getting out of Dodge while she's still got some dignity left...and even so, she'll be the butt of nasty political jokes long after she's gone. And it's a damn shame to me, because she was willing to take on her political opponents on matters of policy that are vital to our national economy right now. But no: it was more important to mock her Christian faith, her quaint accent, her lack of international travel (George Washington never left the States, by the way--neither did Lincoln), her wardrobe, her family's personal tragedies, or her lack of an Ivy League pedigree. So: another conservative politician goes down in flames, to the great delight of the TV pundits; and another several dozen or hundred or thousand serious citizens think twice about running for office for fear of the trashing that might face them...which is the whole point of the trashing.

I don't really care "who started it." I'm more interested in who's going to take a shot at stopping it. You can find examples of dirty politics in America going back to at least 1800. In the television era, one might find mobsters enforcing dead men voting to elect Kennedy or Nixon bugging his enemies to take an election he was likely to win anyway. I don't care. Would it kill our politicians to ATTEMPT the high road? And if someone DOES take the high road--say, by criticizing someone in power about their policies--would it kill the other guy to respond in kind rather than look for dirt as a way to discredit the criticism?

Of course we do have such things--the televised debates, which are a choreographed exercise in policy trial balloons and sound bites--and they bore the public to death because they ARE so scripted. How do we overcome such things? I don't know, but I'd like to see it tried. Call it principled naiveity.