Several interesting post have been published over the last months on using blogs and RSS in a crisis communications context. (see a listing below)...
Most of them focused on the media relations aspect. And although I am fully aware of the importance of keeping the media up to date with accurate information during such times, I was thinking about another potential problem.
Here's a potential scenario to describe it:
Of the 2500 employees of the company I work for 90% are mobile workers (they work where it makes most business sense). It is 08:30 AM, and most of them are still on the road to the headquarters or to customer sites.
I get a call (I am stuck in the daily traffic like everyone else) from our security people on my mobile phone telling me that there is a roadblock in our quarter of town shutting down the 2 access routes to the HQ*.
(*Happened recently during the visit of the US President to NATO in Brussels but we were advised of this beforehand of course)
Question: how can I inform my colleague mobile workers not to come to the HQ, leave the highway and deviate to our proximity centers (or work from home for that matter) ?
Answer: It is quite simple, from my mobile phone I post a message to my blog saying "From HQ, access route blocked, please deviate to alternative locations" (or something like that). This posting generates an RSS feed and then it generates an SMS broadcast message to all who subscribed to my feed.
Feedbeep has made this link between RSS and SMS possible and I have been testing it out for 2 weeks now. Here are my findings:
It is a great tool to keep up to date with specific important news (RSS feeds).
The consumer edition spiders new feeds at a regular interval and in my case, I received an SMS on every new posting after a 20 minute delay.
You can use keywords in order to refine your updates which allows for exact fine-tuning of what news you receive on your mobile phone.
Now of course, for a crisis communications set up the 20 minute delay would not work but Feedbeep confirmed to me that they are interested in looking at potential bigger scale deployment of the system on a corporate level.
As a PR Manager I think this is a major step forward; I am now able to communicate immediately to the media, to my employees and other constituents in different formats (e-mail, blog, RSS feed, SMS) depending on the situation.
Here are other interesting articles and applications of RSS and blogs in a crisis context:
Sounding the red alert efficiently
Any other thoughts or tools with regards to using RSS and blogs in a crisis situation are very welcome.
My postings on this site solely reflect my personal views and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.
