Terror scare shows we still need to learn how people are using the Web
Published August 29th, 2006 in GeneralBill Thompson details his airport experiences following the recent terrorism scare in the UK. It really highlights that fact that PR practitioners really have to put a lot more thought into new mediums of communication such as the internet, email and SMS, espeicially their use in crisis situations.
This is going to be a subject I return to on an ongoing basis so I’m going to break down some of his commentary as I form my thinking:
While everything was developing during the morning I had the TV and radio on, and let my attention drift between them while I checked my email, packed and got things together for the day.
I didn’t use the web because things were happening so fast that the ability of speech-based media to break news immediately and the way I could split my attention between what I was doing and what was being said was invaluable.
For all the talk about the Internet becoming people’s first choice of medium for the news, we often overlook how people actually use each medium. No-one is going to flick open their laptop on public transport to read the breaking news and nobody reads the newspaper in moving traffic. PR practitioners need to learn more about each medium rather than simply thinking about getting their piece to land.
But once I got to the airports and into the maelstrom the net was vital. Even if I’d had a portable radio with me, the information I needed was too detailed to be provided by the mass media.
With my laptop I could check detailed lists of cancellations and try to find another flight. The few attempts I made to call reservation centres at BA and Ryanair were as futile as I knew they would be, but I managed to get myself booked on the morning flight to Milan – since cancelled, as you might expect, but rebooked for the evening – within five minutes of being told there were spaces on it.
I think this is especially relevant to crisis situations and highlights the need for dark sites in crisis management plans. I still maintain that not enough respect is show for the Internet as a communications channel. Bill’s experience though highlights its importance. It provides us with a platform to present target audiences with detailed information and serve as a library for other important resources they may be looking for.
Of course it was far from perfect. There’s no way to book a flight for the same day, and Ryanair didn’t bother to send me an email overnight to tell me that my early morning flight had been cancelled, even though they insisted I provided an address. And none of the airlines has anything as useful as an RSS feed for flight updated that I could subscribe to.
It is curious to note that while organisations go to tremendous lengths to capture information about their customers, they only seem to use it to spam us as opposed to a vehicle to communicate directly with us. That seems to be changing though as textually.org reports BA sent “over 20,000 text messages to passengers, cabin crew and cargo staff during the 10-14 August at height of the traffic chaos caused by terror threats.“
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That’s a good point, and the use of e-mail and text messages could have alleviated some of the chaos at the airports as people were informed that all flights were cancelled. If only twenty percent of people due to fly got the text and didn’t turn up, that’s a massive decrease for the authorities to deal with.
Dark sites are also a good idea, as online, in the event of a crisis, people are as likely to go directly to the website of the company or organisation involved as they are to go to a news outlet. Dark sites allow a company to provide hysteria free information to customers in a timely fashion and allows it to present unedited information and advice as quickly as possible.
Any method of communication that allows a company communicate quickly in a crisis is important, as it ensures that any ‘information gap’ can be filled by the company, and it means that the companies credibility is boosted as it is seen as being on top of the problem (as much as possible). Relevant information quickly presented also allows the company to steer the covereage and shows an openess that people will find reassuring.
a series of points:
1) people *do* turn to the web for breaking news in times of crises - that is what the mahor news sites spike on days of crises (concorde crash, 9/11, 7/7) and why some of them actually crash (or, in the bbc’s case, lock on non-uk users, tmeporarily);
2) the news sites are responding to the way people use them in times of crises. unlike rolling news channels where the same reporter presents the same story live every hour, the web sites are able to put the story up once, let you watch it when you want to watch it, and only need the reporter to re-represent the story when there is a change in the story;
3) you say: “nobody reads the newspaper in moving traffic” - are we talking about motorists or public transport? and what’s the point of a newspaper *during* a breaking news story? newspapers are there for post-incident depth and analysis, not breaking news;
4) flipping open your laptop on public transport depends on what the transport medium is. it seems acceptable to do this on the planes and trains, but not the dart, luas or buses. and why use a laptop when you can get the same story on your mobile phone?
the benefit of the internet over traditional broadcast media in a crises is that you can get updates when you are aready for updates - and don’t have to wait for the rolling news channel to roll the story around one more time. and that is why people *do* turn to it - in massive numbers - in times of crises.
That’s what I’m getting at Fearghal. I just don’t think that PR practitioners fully realise that and in general don’t give the Internet enough respect in general.
The fact that people do turn to it but we don’t always have the information there for them is the problem.
that’s not necessarily a pr problem, per se, but actually a techie / it infrastructural one. i’ve worked on lots of large sites that had no cms backend - every page was hard-coded (i once was put in charge of a site which had in excess of 5,000 hard-coded pages - and you would be surprised at the names of some of the organisations even today operating without a database-driven cms and are still reliant on coders to code up new content manually). this is partiicularly true of corporate brochure-ware websites, which aren’t even structured to handle breaking news - in a corporate pr environment. updating such sites is actually quite time consuming. on top of the coding time, you have to add in the buffer time of how long it takes the marketing department to fashion a response, and then clear that response with the legal department, the corporate world is not like a 24hr news channel. if a 24hr news channel is like a sleek racing yacht, able to jink thi way and that at a moment’s notice, most of the corporates are like breat big takers - they take an age to turn.