Category: Facebook

[shameless self-promotion]
Just thought I’d let readers know that I, a guy who usually tries to get reporters to interview other people, was interviewed myself as a *ahem* media expert by InsideHigherEd.com for a follow-up story to the whole Dalhousie/Facebook/puppy murder flare-up (Proving you’re not a puppy murderer, by Andy Guess).
[/shameless self-promotion]

Guess’ story views the Dalhousie situation — a resurgent Facebook group of 22,000-plus members that accuses Dalhousie of conducting inhumane research on puppies — in terms of crisis management in the age of social networks:

One of a public relations officer’s worst nightmares is a lie that won’t go away, and Dalhousie University recently confronted a doozy: that it was experimenting on cuddly, doe-eyed puppies and kittens.

Normally in such situations, a university might take steps to release information that rebuts the charges, or it might make contact with the source of the allegations. But in this case the statements in question were online, contained within a group on the social-networking Web site Facebook, and accessible to anyone with an account. The group … was founded by someone who apparently was never even a student there.

Now, after an inital attempt to have the group removed from Facebook failed, the university is considering its legal options. “It’s a clear case of defamation,” said Charles Crosby, media relations manager at Dalhousie, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The case illustrates not only how a university confronts allegations, but the evolving ways in which damaging information is spreading from multiple, uncontrollable sources online.

This case raises some interesting issues about communicating in the social media sphere. Dalhousie, the InsideHigherEd story points out, “is highlighting highlighting efforts by other students to counter the original group. One, a Facebook group called “Stop People From Spreading Lies About Animal Cruelty At Dalhousie”, was started by a student who works in a laboratory at the university. Still, they’ve got an uphill battle: Only a little over 400 members have joined that group, which can’t match the visceral hook of a vulnerable beagle puppy displayed on the original’s page.”

When I received Guess’s email query to chat about crisis communications in the web 2.0 world, I wasn’t mcuh up to speed on the latest developments at Dalhousie, so we spoke in broader terms of how colleges and universities might handle such crises. My lone quote is rightly buried in the story (paragraph nine, if you’re looking). Guess quotes some better experts, such as Rae Goldsmith of CASE and Teresa Valerio Parrot of SimpsonScarborough, whose quote at the end of the story wraps it all up nicely.