21st Century Crisis Management: How Cronyism, Ignorance and Bravado Are No Substitute for Strategy, Knowledge and Talent. A Worst Case Study

“We live in a world where [organizational] reputations are fragile and where crises seem to be occurring more and more. The role of the communicator in this environment is critical. Furthermore, the communication planner who might foresee and prepare for such eventualities is a significant player in our interconnected and changing world.” -Risk Issues and Crisis Management, Michael Regester and Judy Larkin

A traditional understanding and warning by proven leaders in the public relations world. But what happens when your communicators measure in the hundreds, or even thousands and extend beyond the traditional understanding of influencer, stakeholder, empowerment and even employment? The Social Web spreads out that role of  communicator, and it’s significance, throughout an organization and beyond, blurring the lines between organization and public.

In the case of Penn State University, there are  96,000 students, 67,000 direct and indirect employees, 557,000 living alumni, and countless stakeholders and fans. Penn State pursued a reactive change strategy and adhered to a precautionary principle which left the organization with little agility in the face of crisis and alienated all the people in a position to help, leaving them disempowered, uninformed, vulnerable and largely impotent at the time of the greatest need.

21^st century crisis management (and Penn State University) requires a sense of urgency, humility, agility, openness, cooperation and a profound ability to change what could be centuries old norms, ideals and behavior. This session addresses the models and tools of modern crisis management principles, online and off.

I been there, I know.

The Facebook integration adds value to the product (I got a better understanding of the word by reading the various diverse quotes users posted), crowd sources content creation (Us adding our quotes is adding content which is picking up new users from new search results now that PK Dick and Dewey, etc are mentioned), and cross promotes (also posts to my Facebook wall). Form and function at its finest.

I find it hillarious, the 4th post down, you got: heavy quote, heavy quote, heavy quote, looking up words I don’t know that people write on my daughters Facebook wall, so awesome. You’re fine dude, your daughter seems smart enough to take care of herself.

Also appearing on my Facebook wall.

1 ) Below your link or status update text field, is a little lock and arrow that when clicked is usually set to Everyone.

2) If you choose custom, you get these choices:

3) Make your geographic choices (multiple locations can be chosen, eg. State College, Bellefonte or Ohio, New Jersey).

Any questions?

1) Go to your Facebook Page.

2) Directly below your Page’s Profile photo, click on “Edit Page”.

3) In your browser’s URL, note the number that comes AFTER ‘edit/?id=’ That number is your Page ID.

4) Go to this URL, but change REPLACEME to your Page ID from step 3: http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/app_settings.php?id=REPLACEME&aid=2305272732

5) Click the setting for “Allow All Fans to Tag Photos”

6) Save your settings.

In case anyone wants to know why this works, all it is doing is accessing the “Photo Application” settings by using the Application ID (the Facebook Photos Application ID is ’2305272732′).

Let’s hope the Facebook Gods add a fix soon so we can easily change settings without having to run backdoor fixes. =)

This is the 2nd time in a month that I have modified settings on our pages through a secret URL. Got to stay on your toes and do some figuring when dealing with a company with 500 million customers. Hope you find this useful.

1. RSS (The Grunt Work)
2. RSS for Twitter
3. RSS for SEO
4. RSS for Creating Mailing Lists and Newsletters
5. Share
6. Working with Social Media and Web site Analytics Together(hidden tracks) Yahoo Pipes & Aggregation

PART III – RSS FOR SEO

Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center are free tools that allow you to optimize the relationship between their search engine and your Web site.

Cool picture, huh?

In Google and Yahoo, you can tell them all about your shiny new RSS feed, which in theory, feeds your fresh data directly into their search databases. (Bing does not explicitly say you can do this with RSS, but adding it as a sitemap does not cause an error) Checking just now, I see that 102 new URL’s on my site were delivered to Google today. This great for my active discussion forum. With 800 new messages per day, our conversations can be indexed and appear in search results while the topics are still timely.

Interestingly, our community has become the de facto news, reference and support network for ailing musicians, their families and fans.

Feedburner is another free Google service that is much like Webmaster Tools but for RSS feeds. It takes the crazy data and makes sense of it, displays it pleasingly, and gives you several tools to publicize and deliver your feed. It ends up looking like this.

Of the Publicizing tools is PingShot. It is the next evolution of RSS, the PubSubHubbub protocol (yes, that’s its real name). RSS creates the illusion of pushing data, while PubSubHubbub actually does it. By enabling this, any listening hubs will be “pinged”, telling them you have new content.

Feedburner keeps analytics for your feeds that provide you information about where your data is going. In mine, I see “msnbot-UDiscovery/2.0b”, which is the Bing crawler, as a subscriber to my music blog’s RSS feed.  This means, to me at least, that they’re listening.

Feedburner also allows you to connect your Twitter accounts to do things like automatically tweet about your new blog post.  The catch is that Google uses their own proprietary url shortener goo.gl which provides no analytics or control, which is why I use TwitterFeed.com for that.

You can also use this service to setup, feed and manage an email mailing list. It even generates the code for you to put on your Web site to allow people to signup. It keeps and allows you to manage your subscriber list. It does not, however, allow you to load a list into it. A service such as MailChimp takes the final step to the RSS-Feed-To-Email-Newletter process, both in aesthetics and direct marketing management.

All of these things, seemingly, getting the word out.

Just a quick note on blog SEO. Note my title of this one, and therefore the URL it ends up having. It is important to use thoughtful keywords in the title that very specifically describe the core message of your post. It weighs heavy in Google’s decision that your blog post is relevant to the keywords used in the search.

The title of part 2 is an example of what not to do. We’ll see if I can garner a few extra hits to this post with this little tweak.

I also applied every trick in this post, today, to this blog. Let’s see what happens…

1. RSS (The Grunt Work)
2. RSS for Twitter
3. RSS for SEO
4. RSS for Creating Mailing Lists and Newsletters
5. Share
6. Working with Social Media and Web site Analytics Together(hidden tracks) Yahoo Pipes & Aggregation

PART 2 – RSS to TWITTER

My goal was merely to extend the availability of the information that is collected on this site everyday. Our members are kind of hard core. Real music and history freaks. Creates a bit of a closed society. But we talk about, research and document things that are more universally… interesting. The Twitterverse is new real estate with a new demographic. I see it as putting up a library in a new town.

So I created a Twitter account and fed it, with full disclosure, with my new RSS feed.

The RSS feed takes the title of the forum topics and the number of messages within and are sorted by date.  I use another free and easy to use service, TwitterFeed.com to take it from there.

All I do there is paste in my RSS feed link, tell it how often I want it to post, how many updates at a time, whether I want it to add hashtags or if I want it filtered by keyword.

Filtering allows you to set up various feeds to alter the hashtag depending on the subject matter, or for other specific applications. As an example, @tgw108 over at WPSU filters all my tweets from @MaxSpiegel and @MudcatCafe and pulls anything that mentions the word “blues” and has it post to The Blues Show section of wpsu.org.  It keeps the page timely and makes it really easy for me to promote underwriters and local live blues music.

Also in the TwitterFeed setup, I can enter in my bit.ly account information to automatically track every link that is posted and how many times it’s clicked. Pretty good analytics from this including referrer so that I can tell if the click came from my FriendFeed, Buzz or other Social Media site that includes your Twitter Feed as a part of its offering. Please note that URL shortening can be used anywhere, not only on Twitter or other social networks. It has become an instant and free vanity URL factory.

bitly.Pro provides even more analytics and allows you to connect your own shortener domain name to help with the branding. I ordered mudc.at from Godaddy.com, followed a few simple steps and was all connected within an hour.

This vanity URL shortener is important to note because an objection to using outside services, such as all these that I’m mentioning and blogs and such, is that they’re all working to brand their own services and it can detract from a cohesive feel to your presence. I want to control my brand, not diffuse it with Google logos or bit.ly URLs.  It may also detract from the integrity of the brand. Penn State, for instance, is a big bad mother (shut your mouth) and shouldn’t need any outside services to help it.

Tweeting one’s new blog post is just about mandatory now days, that is to say, most people do it consistently. So I also use TwitterFeed.com to check my music blog for new posts, and to tweet the title and link to those. Removing steps from the process, simply automating what I would do anyway. If we try to get faculty or our administrative leadership to engage with Social Media, removing as many steps as possible can only improve our chances.

The analytics of my personal blog indicate that over 17% of the traffic comes from the tweets about new posts.

The items that I “share” in my Google Reader are also checked every half hour. I follow several music blogs and have Google Alerts set up for certain musicians that I like, and if I see something interesting, I click one button, and it’ll tweet the next cycle.

All in all, I am providing an information resource concerning traditional music that is either generated by my content, my interest or the activity of the membership to a very specific interest group. While it is automated, it is inherently vetted, edited and moderated.

Coming next is how to use your RSS feed for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This simply means to have your content findable, and quickly. Social Media moves fast, and is here and gone. For it to be useful to marketing, our content needs to move fast too.

Continue on to [Part III - RSS for SEO]

It seems like I’ve been defending marketing my entire career. When budgets get tight, non-marketing bean counters just decide to lop a percentage off the top of the marketing budget without concern for the effects of that. Sadly, in my experience, a relational drop of expectation does not correspond to the budget cut.

I am a soldier. The war that we are in is heating up. We’re taking new hits. If we keep doing the same thing, there’ll be nothing left of us. The enemy is closing in, we need to make adjustments. I got an idea… lets use less weaponry.  Absurd.

So, I tell the “Kellogg vs. Post story” when I try to defend marketing’s place in this tumultuous environment.

Read more of about this in The New Yorker article “Hanging Tough” by James Surowiecki.

1. RSS (The Grunt Work)
2. RSS for Twitter
3. RSS for SEO
4. RSS for Creating Mailing Lists and Newsletters
5. Share
6. Working with Social Media and Web site Analytics Together(hidden tracks) Yahoo Pipes & Aggregation

PREFACE

To preface this article, only possible after I’ve written most of it, it is important to note that it took me longer to write this description and assessment than it did to actually implement the social media engagement. I say this because although all the tools I use are free, the hours that we spend at Penn State are more valuable then ever. Things that take a lot of time are simply not going to fly in this current climate.

This is online guerrilla marketing.

But also, the documentation and assessment process can sometime become burdensome and is often forgotten to be added to the calculations. Perhaps much like us time-tracking our analysis of all of our time-tracking. It gets weird in there, and eventually becomes counterproductive.

PART 1 – RSS GOALS

My initial goal was to simply create an RSS feed of the daily activity of mudcat.org for my own use.

The draw of mudcat.org is the discussion forum where we talk about folk songs, singer/songwriters, musical instruments, and life as how it relates to tradition and song. We average about 800 new messages per day. About 5% of the messages are on new topics and the rest are from existing topics that now exceed 85,000 in number.

I wanted to get a list of topics in my reader and my email every morning as simply a quick way to keep an eye on things. With a Web site in which the vast majority of content comes from it’s users (much like Facebook Groups), our job becomes to maintain a certain order. I’m always seeking new tools in which to care and cultivate the community.

Step one was to program an RSS feed of the active topics of our forum. Essentially taking the same code that makes the forum work but reformatting the output to comply with RSS format. I am a very average beg-borrow-and-steal kind of programmer and it took me a couple of hours to figure it out and get to work, so I think damn near any of us could do it.

This is a popular RSS icon. RSS feeds are everywhere these days. The YouTube videos that you upload, your Twitter posts, Facebook status updates, Google Alerts, your Blog posts and even your Amazon WishList and NetFlix rentals already have the RSS part done for you. There is also infrastructure on much of the Penn State and Outreach content on the Web and Social Networks that are already set up for this.

RSS was created to improve the experience of change to the Web. RSS serves to add a chronology to a living, changing Web site, organizes it, gives the user the choice of how it is delivered, and delivers it. It remains a powerful resource, though not widely used in the mainstream demographic. View This Poll

These techniques simply deliver the same RSS goodness to more popular mechanisms (Twitter, Email, Facebook).

No two RSS feed links look the same. Here are some of mine: http://digg.com/users/MaxSpiegel/history.rss OR http://rss.netflix.com/TrackingRSS?id=P6352635209584078500019341428670625 OR http://maxspiegel.posterous.com/rss.xml OR http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/18513524.rss

And my raw mudcat RSS feed looks like: http://mudcat.org/threads-rss-www.cfm If you click on that and see the data, it might be hard to understand how that could be useful in any way.

Once you have a feed, a service like Google’s Feedburner can format and manage the distribution and analytics of that feed. Your data, or content, is now portable. It can be formatted into an email newsletter, it can be fed to other sites or blogs, shared on social networking sites or my favorite part, fed directly into Google and Yahoo search engine databases dramatically reducing the time it takes my 800 new daily messages to get into their search results.

Doesn’t this sound like fun?

An upcoming post will touch upon aggregation. Combining various RSS feeds into one comes in handy sometimes. Yahoo Pipes is an excellent tool for this process.  Again, a free tool that a laymen like me can navigate and make useful in a reasonable amount of time. AgSci, as an example, uses Yahoo Pipes to combine five different faculty members’ blogs into one feed.

Why do they do this and what do they do with it? Stay tuned for my next installment… [Part II]

[For giggles, I aggregated everything I could find about me. My blogs, twitter, facebook, netflix, youtube, digg, delicious, vimeo, redux, even all the songs I listen to here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MaxSuperFeed.]

Another example is making an RSS feed out of a Twitter search. Here is an RSS Feed of all tweets within 15 miles of State College Raw and Burned. A nice way to keep an eye on what’s happing in our geographic area.