What’s So Good about Social Media in a Crisis?

Compared to other traditional means of crisis communication, it turns out that social media has a lot to recommend it. Part of this is due to its popularity. Part is also due to the interactions that typify social media sites and that facilitate good crisis management. Before the Internet, crisis management was largely a matter of phone management with a press release to try to get information out to customers or the public. But the effort required to answer calls, the frustration when all lines were busy, and the inevitable delay before publication in newspapers often led to poor results and damage to reputations. How do social media sites make this better? Read more