[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications]
The terrorist attacks in France were yet another reminder – as if we needed one – that when big stuff happens, more people are turning to one particular outlet for news and information: Twitter.
That has to mean something to the folks charged with communicating during a crisis. The Harvard Business Review provides an interesting look at what it all means for Twitter users and the people charged with writing the crisis tweets, via a Q&A with Jeannette Sutton, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and director of the Risk and Disaster Communication Center at the University of Kentucky. (A tip of the hat to St. Vincent Charity Medical Center’s Wendy Hoke for alerting us to the Harvard Business Review story on LinkedIn.)
Among Sutton’s many salient points: “Even though Twitter and other feeds have now been used in disaster response for almost a decade, there’s still a perception that it’s a social media channel, so somehow not worth the time, or it’s just for younger people. Lots of organizations just put the youngest person on their team in charge of it – ‘Oh, we’ll just put our intern in charge of it.’ But you’re entrusting these people to update the public with vital information.”
Indeed, whether it’s youngest, oldest or someone in between, organizations faced with communicating during a crisis should be putting one of their best communicators on Twitter. Because on Twitter a lot of your customers and other stakeholders are going to learn about how you handled your crisis.
And news consumers on Twitter are going to do more than just consume, according to a 2015 study from the American Press Institute, which reported: “While Twitter users follow news in general on the service, and sometimes do so just as a way of passing time, they act differently when they are following breaking news, becoming even more participatory—commenting, posting and sharing at moments when events are moving fastest.”
Moreover, Twitter’s influence extends far beyond Twitter. Again from the Press Institute: “An even wider world of people encounter Twitter without using it. Of all Twitter users, 68% see hashtags and Twitter handles or tweets displayed on TV, 61% in news stories, 52% from people reading tweets on TV. 40% hear about Twitter from friends and 28% on billboards, bus signs and elsewhere. These are noticed by non-Twitter social media users too. Fully 51% of non-Twitter users have seen Tweets — 45% on TV, 33% from friends, 27% in news articles they read digitally, 22% from going to twitter.com without signing up, 12% from search and 8% in the newspaper.”
We see this at various levels of breaking news, from big international, as with the France terrorist attacks, to local. On cleveland.com, it’s regular practice to add a Twitter feed to news stories – especially breaking news stories, as was the case with the recent crash of a plane in Akron, Ohio.
In other words, people are going to see news about you via Twitter. What they see is, in part, up to you.