Category: crisis communications

Kent State’s measured response to the Ebola media frenzy

The Ebola media craze has finally reached higher education, and Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, is responding appropriately, without fueling the news and social media paranoia.

U.S. online media mentions of Ebola have increased dramatically since the first case of the virus was diagnosed in the U.S.
U.S. online media mentions of Ebola have increased dramatically since the first case of the virus was diagnosed in the U.S.

Earlier this week, media reports indicated that the second healthcare worker diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, Texas, had recently visited Ohio and stayed with three Kent State employees, who are also the patient’s relatives. The patient is also a Kent State graduate. The university directed those three exposed employees to stay home, and a media frenzy ensued.

Kent State reacted swiftly to media speculation, posting a statement on the university website, holding a press conference and sharing updates on social media. Kent State President Beverly Warren has also used her Twitter account to communicate how the university is addressing the issue and speculation.

Tara Smith, a Kent State associate professor of epidemiology, posted her take on the situation at Kent State: Here’s What It Looks Like When Ebola Fear Comes to the Heartland. “When news broke, the university immediately commenced an ‘all hands on deck’ response,” she writes, adding that the response had been met with mixed reviews on campus.

From my distant perspective, I think Kent State is doing everything right. The response was swift yet measured. Social media is playing a critical role. Campus leaders are taking a proactive approach to communicating.

Still, the media attention continues.

“Unfortunately,” writes Smith, “the worst part of the situation has indeed been the news media. Radio stations suggested that Ebola would be spread far and wide around Kent and Cleveland, that the plane the patient flew on should have been nuked and never used again, baggage handlers at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport should be quarantined because ‘they may have touched her suitcase’ and that everyone was at risk, no matter how tenuous their connection to the area and the patient.”

The media attention may have a silver lining. A MediaMiser post from earlier this month suggests that the increased media attention “could be a good thing for overall efforts to fight the smouldering outbreak in West Africa.”

Aid organizations like the WHO and Doctors Without Borders have been pleading for the Western world’s attention towards the epidemic for months.

It seems they finally have it.

Yet a week or so since that post, U.S. media attention has shifted markedly from the crisis in Africa to the cases in the U.S. Even as Americans become more aware of Ebola, we are still confused about how the disease is transmitted.

For higher education institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere, we find ourselves with an opportunity to educate and communicate. With many international students studying on our campuses, we are targets of fearful U.S. citizens who may wonder whether students from other countries or professors returning from abroad might be carriers of the disease. We will need to communicate rationally about the potential concerns surrounding Ebola in our countries, how we are equipped to address the potential of exposure and what precautions we are taking to minimize risk. We also have the opportunity to help educate the public. We will have ample opportunity to do so, because this concern is not likely to go away any time soon.

Related: From The Chronicle of Higher Education: As Ebola Fears Touch Campuses, Officials Respond With an “Excess of Caution”.

New book on #highered social media: Social Works

'Social Works' goes live Feb. 25.
‘Social Works’ goes live Feb. 25.

Months in the making, a new book about social media in higher education marketing — perhaps the book on the subject — is about to hit the marketplace.

Social Works: How #HigherEd Uses #SocialMedia to Raise Money, Build Awareness, Recruit Students, and Get Results will officially be available in print and ebook formats next Monday, Feb. 25, 2013. (There’s also a launch party scheduled for the following day in Boston. I won’t say much about that, though, because I’m jealous that I won’t be there.)

Social Works is a collection of 25 case studies from colleges and universities large and small, public and private, all of which have embraced social media to help them accomplish a wide array of goals, from fundraising to student recruitment to alumni engagement and crisis management.

Edited by Michael Stoner (@mstonerblog), the president and co-founder of mStoner Inc., Social Works demonstrates, he writes, “that social media has the maturity and reach to be an integral component of campaigns focused on building awareness, recruiting students, engaging alumni and other key audiences, raising money, and accomplishing important goals that matter to a college or university.”

I was thrilled when Michael approached me about being a part of this project. He asked me to write a chapter on using social media for crisis communication, based on our staff’s response to a gunman on the Missouri University of Science and Technology campus in May 2011. (I blogged about that experience immediately afterward. The case study goes much more in depth.) I was happy to oblige. It’s been a great experience and a truly collaborative effort with Michael, his team at mStoner and Eduniverse, and many of my colleagues in higher education.

To give you a taste of what’s in store, download a sample chapter from Social Works. This chapter, by Justin Ware (@justinjware), describes how Florida State University leveraged social media to raise more than $186,000 in an online-only campaign.

Big brand social media blunders and lessons for #highered

shocked business woman“The bigger they are, the harder they fall” is an adage that seems to hold true for big brands in social media these days. When big brands mishandle a situation in the social media sphere, the fallout can be significant for the companies.

But these failures hold valuable lessons for us in higher ed social media work. These situations, as they become magnified and amplified into full-blown crises by social media’s “Ever-Shifting Mob” (fellow higher ed blogger Dennis Miller‘s apt description), should serve as cautionary tales for all of us who deal with social media in the higher education.

Brandchannel recently dissected two recent big brand blunders:

  • The Applebee’s firestorm that occurred after the company fired a waitress for posting a photo of a receipt from a pastor who wrote on the bill, “”I give God 10% why do you get 18”; and
  • The out-of-control Twitter chatter that occurred in the UK when struggling music retailer HMV announced layoffs, which one of its social media managers live-tweeted.

(Hat tip to Kary Delaria, @KaryD, for sharing the Brandchannel post via Twitter.)

Social media and PR, integrated

Both situations contain important lessons about the importance of integrating social media and public relations functions during a crisis. But there are other issues at play here:

  • Respond quickly but thoughtfully. Speaking to Brandchannel, SHIFT Communications CEO Todd Defren advises to “respond immediately to show you’re listening, but that needn’t mean falling on the sword. Most reasonable folks just need to know you’re aware and pondering vs. reacting thoughtlessly. ‘We hear you and we’re thinking this through. We’ll get back to you’ is a placeholder for sanity.”
  • Manage your social media presence. A no-brainer, right? But the ultimate failure in both situations was a lack of organizational structure for handling a brewing social media crisis. “Crisis communications in social should be planning like a PR crisis: there should be both preparation and response,” Teresa Caro of Enguage told Brandchannel. “[B]rands must have an upfront plan that anticipates a reaction.”
  • Be transparent. It’s cliche, but true. “The essence of a strong relationship with customers is transparency,” said Frederick Felman, CMO of MarkMonitor. “In the case of a faux pas, do the right thing – acknowledge the issue and engage in sincere and honest dialog with the community.”

All great advice. But much of it boils down to 1.) integrating social and PR functions for any organization, 2.) planning and preparing for the inevitable social media dust-up, and 3.) management training and empowering the PR and social media team to respond in real time.

A year ago, I wrote about how the PR and social media functions in higher education should be integrated at all times — not just during a crisis situation. Maybe it’s time to revisit that topic for further discussion, and to see how far higher ed has come in a year.

P.S. – Another post worth reading on one of these crises is Dennis Miller’s A tip for Applebee’s. A higher ed PR veteran, Miller offers some good thoughts on how that corporation and its “sadly under-prepared management” might have handled the situation better.

Image courtesy of © Dead_morozzzka | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

CASE V & VI: Better Together in Chicago

I’ll be in Chicago next week for the joint conference of CASE Districts V and VI: Better Together. I’ll also be presenting on Tuesday, Dec. 11.

CASEV-VI_Banner2012

Our host city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, once advised President Obama to never let a serious crisis go to waste, and I’m taking the mayor’s words to heart. I’ll be co-presenting about the role social media plays in crisis communications, focusing my portion of the session on the lessons learned from a May 2011 incident on our campus in which a gunman drove onto campus and ran into a building, forcing us to initiate what we erroneously called a “lockdown.” (Speaking of lessons learned: No campus can be entirely locked down.)

My co-presenter is Brian Huonker, assistant director of marketing at Illinois State University, who has had his own share of crises to deal with in recent years.

So, if you’re attending the conference and you’re interested in the subject of social media’s role in crisis communication, I hope you’ll join us.

Friday Five: 5 questions with Chris Syme, author of ‘Listen, Engage, Respond’

Chris Syme is a strategic communications consultant based in Bozeman, Montana, and the author of a new e-book about crisis communications called Listen, Engage, Respond: Crisis Communications in Real Time. This concise e-book is a terrific primer for anyone involved in crisis communications at any level. Chris describes it as “a self-help book written for anyone.”

Chris’s blog, CKSyme.org, is a must-read for anyone in higher ed interested in  issues management, reputation management and crisis communications. Recently, I asked Chris five questions about her new book. Here are her responses.

Chris Syme, CKSyme.org

1. What prompted you to write Listen, Engage, Respond?

Chris Syme: Most of the crisis strategies I see are weak in some areas. Everyone has a strength — some deal with planning, some are about in-crisis response, and even some know how to incorporate the basics of social media into a communications strategy. But, a couple concerns really stood out.

First, nobody seemed to be stressing the importance of listening for a crisis, and there is a real lack of practical advice out there — here’s-how-you-do-it kind of stuff. Second, the whole idea of developing social media engagement strategies designed to build loyalty and bolster reputation in order to help avert a crisis was missing. We’ve been busy learning how to use social media to sell stuff, do customer service, get reach, find donors, etc., but not much about how to develop loyalty. The value of loyalty is hard to measure, but those of us in crisis and reputation management know it’s a valuable shield come crisis time.

Crisis managers are writing about how to put a plan together and how to act once you have a crisis, but nobody is talking about how to prevent one with social media strategies. I think that organizations, especially higher education, were crying out for help.

After I did the two surveys over the winter on crisis preparedness — one for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the other for the College Sports Information Directors (CoSIDA) — I realized we were all woefully unprepared for what many were experiencing. Crisis prevention is tough to sell, and when it happens, people want to outsource or hide. The book was designed to be kind of a hands-on manual for success.

2. From your perspective, where do you think most colleges and universities fall short in their crisis communications efforts?

Chris Syme: The surveys we did last winter showed that the biggest gap was in monitoring. Most schools fail to monitor the accounts that represent the school. As a matter of fact, most respondents didn’t even know how many accounts were representing the school. Lack of organization was widespread. And very few offer training and help for those in the social media space representing the institution. The surveys produced five action points that are critical for schools to address now:

  • Implement a social media monitoring system to be used to track brand mentions and to function as triage in the event of a crisis
  • Implement a social media management system/dashboard from which all social media accounts can be managed
  • Establish registration or affiliation for accounts that represent the institution
  • Develop a social media policy or guidelines and provide training
  • Establish a community manager; a hub to the institution’s spokes

3. On a macro level, what do you see as the top two or three looming issues for higher education that we must be prepared to manage?

Chris Syme: Number one is certainly the issue of privacy. This hits every corner of campus — from requiring student-athletes to “friend” coaches on Facebook, prohibiting employees from using social media at work, firing faculty or staff for negative posts on social media, students stalking other students on social media, faculty developing inappropriate relationships with students online — boy the list goes on and on. We are going to see a lot of court cases over the next few years. Schools must make sure their policies are legal. Campus lawyers need to take a short course, or get some help in navigating social media issues. And, we need to educate our campuses (students and staff) on how to use social media appropriately.

Next, I think we need to address the brewing hysteria over public dissatisfaction expressed in social media. We need to keep our wits. I saw a piece the other day where someone had called a few band members yelling a racial slur at a basketball game a disaster. Really? A disaster? Unfortunate bad behavior, but not a disaster. The school had bent over backwards and kept the issue in the public eye so long it became an issue. I think social media triage needs to come to the forefront, and we need to learn the art of appropriate response.  We don’t need to expel a student or fire a faculty member every time somebody calls us out on Twitter. I think institutions are becoming afraid of the power of social media. The funny thing, that power works both ways. If we spent as much time building loyalty and cred in social media as we do looking for issues to apologize about, we wouldn’t need to worry about it. An invested loyal community in social media will police itself.

If I could give a third issue, I’d say the sheer amount of tools and innovations that we are bombarded with as marketers and communicators–every week a new app or tool. Find out what works. Don’t be in a hurry to jump on the bandwagon. Know how much time and resources you have. Have a strategic plan and implement only those strategies that further the goals. Everybody doesn’t need to be on Foursquare.

4. Related to Question 3, what are the best approaches for addressing those issues?

Chris Syme: Other than what I said above, take a deep breath and remember that social media is good and bad, ugly and beautiful. And you need it all for it to work. Crisis prevention can be accelerated in social media if done well. The same media channels we spend hours wringing our hands over can be the media that helps us sleep at night. To me, training and education are the key. Teach people how to harness the power of social media to build reputation and deepen loyalty. Then, you’ll have a corps of faithful advocates in a crisis.

When it comes to crisis, I just think we need to understand that those same engagement strategies we use for admissions and alumni can be used to build reputation. Think in terms of integrated strategies.

5. Finally, what is the key point that you would like every reader to take from your book?

Chris Syme: It’s a self-help book written for everyone.  It doesn’t matter if you’re K-12, higher ed, big, small — the book was designed to teach you how to build an effective crisis communication strategy. I didn’t write the book so people would call me, I wrote the book so they wouldn’t have to. It’s a process-oriented book loaded with resources to help everyone “be their own media.” That’s the tagline of my agency. I think we succeeded.