I've been meaning to write this blog post for weeks. Not only has it been more than two months since I last posted to this blog, but there was plenty to write about in the wake of Superstorm (don't call it a hurricane) Sandy. As the days and weeks went by, I intended to post on various anniversary dates, but other work and life got in the way.
But last Friday, NJSCPA Digital Communications Manager
Rachael Bell and I were asked to report to the Society's Board of Trustees about how we communicated with our members in the aftermath of Sandy. The presentation was titled "
Social Media & Crisis Communications", but could have easily been called "What does a membership organization do when staff wake up one morning and can't communicate with members?"
That was the case the morning of Tuesday,October 30, the day after Sandy ripped through our area. The anxiety that staff felt from not being able to send email or update our website of course pales in comparison to the heartache that thousands of Garden State residents felt that morning, but we knew that members wanted (needed) to know what was going on with CPE programs, other members, and of course tax updates, so we started communicating the only way we could -- through social media.
And we weren't alone. Through the storm and in the aftermath, we saw images (
some fake) of the devastation from Sandy all over social networking sites. Social networks helped people stay in touch and gave those outside of the storm’s path a way to see what kind of havoc Sandy caused.
There have been several good articles written about our area's first "social media disaster."
NYmag.com described the storm as a "
coming-of-age moment for Instagram" and
Verizon Wireless News Center told us how "FEMA recommended people turn to Twitter during the storm to communicate with authorities" instead of using the phone lines.
Our first updates went out via our
Facebook,
Twitter and
LinkedIn pages, and we continued to update members via social media even after email and our website came back online. In fact, we had some members and staff tell us that they learned more via social media than through our traditional communications vehicles. See our complete Sandy communications timeline in our
presentation.
I confess that in the two years that Rachael and I have been conducting our social media presentations it never occurred to me that social networking sites could serve a crisis communications purpose. In fact, we talked more about social media causing a crisis than we did about it helping people get through one.
But in the age of Halloween snow storms, hundred year floods that happen every few years and never before seen superstorms, it's clear that social media is no longer just a business imperative -- it's a communications imperative. if you haven't incorporated social media into your communications plan, you do so at your peril.
#CPAInsights