At the Blog Business Summit today, A-listers Robert Scoble, Buzz Bruggeman and Anil Dash,
discussed the issue of crisis communications, and how blogging can
help. The panel focused on the humanization factor of blogs and
the importance of getting to know and understand your audience and how
they perceive things. Emphasis was placed on how blogs can help
to develop strong customer relationships, understand who the
influencers are, and know the gatekeepers so a crisis response can be
mobilized and disseminated.
Brian Chin from the Seattle P.I. recaps the discussion in his Buzzworthy blog and outlines a few crisis communications blogging ideas:
- A blog can project a human face or voice for an organization and help defuse negative feelings.
- A blog provides a forum for soliciting specific feedback from customers about their concerns.
- A blog makes it possible to respond quickly when a situation
arises. Scoble suggested that simply posting a brief acknowledgment of
a problem, to let people know that the company is aware of it, can buy
time to mobilize a response.
Steve Rubel offers some additional steps:
- Continually listen and analyze
- Develop a list of vulnerabilities
- Build a lockbox blog
- Build a network of blog allies
- Ride the long tail