Reblogged from Surrey News:

Sniffer dog Tilly is the latest recruit to a fire investigation team that has helped halve the number of arsons in Surrey. The Springer Spaniel has recently joined Surrey Fire and Rescue Service’s arson task force which has slashed the number of deliberate fires by 48% since 2004. Two year old Tilly completed three months of rigorous training after being donated to the fire service. She uses her extraordinary sense of smell to detect even the smallest traces of flammable liquids, such as petrol and …

My latest

Reblogged from Surrey News:

Surrey County Council has won a national technology award supported by the Prime Minister. The council won the best project delivery category in the UK Public Sector Digital Awards for developing technology to help support vulnerable children*. David Cameron said the awards recognise “brilliant work” in local government. He said: “I congratulate all the nominees and encourage all digital specialists across the public sector to follow their good example and innovation.” Surrey County Council’s …

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Work
-Making a 480pg catalogue.
-Trying to SEO optimise a few sites.
-Mentoring some businesses that are new to Social Media.
-Running a PPC campaign for a charity.
-Building a new website.
-Photo shoots.

Personal

-Finding some new hiking boots.
-Organising my dive kit.
-Finding somewhere to live.

“Genuine engagement and preparation seems to be lynchpin from yesterday’s CIPR Social Media Conference.

Much as I suspected their is no simple solution to dealing with a crisis, especially in these days of social media. Instead a number of key principles, some preparation and some good judgement seem to be the rulers of the day.  Over the years Social Media has been used in the arsenal of PR Practitioners to deal with various crisis, however, it seems more and more that social media itself is a cause or stimuli for crisis mode.

According to Marshall Manson, there are three main routes to an online crisis. Firstly a building crescendo of negativity, secondly when a offline issue goes online, and thirdly when a coordinated attack occurs on you.

So the first real question, and in true CIPR style we really need a definition of a crisis and a indicator of when it’s time to do something.

Firstly, I would suggest that nearly anything could be a crisis, all a crisis really is is an extension of your day to day reputation management work but with the ante upped a wee bit.

Manson suggests a pretty simple equation of when a crisis has hit and when to do something. It’s a simple box chart with the level of influence of the person talking about it versus what he dubs the compellingness of the situation, or the “oh shit” factor.

High influence and high “oh shit” and you need to do something fast, lower of each and action might not be needed but monitoring and planning does.

Manson explains that in crisis management about 80% of situations across his desk require monitor only, another 10% you start preparing to do something with 10% requiring an immediate response.

Of course to be able to even spot a crisis coming or to be aware of what stage it is at an accurate, reliable and informative system of monitoring is required. Monitoring on its own is not good enough, you need to be analyzing sentiment, that means a human bean needs to be involved at some-point. Automatic sentiment analyst can only be so good, Luke Brynley-Jones explained that good sentiment analysis can only be about 70% accurate. Most humans I know struggle with sarcasm, or British wit so I’m not sure how any computer can try to ‘get it’. Add in regional or sector slang and I’ll be surprised if anyone knows what is really going on.

Getting good monitoring is essential, but understanding what it’s telling you is even more important. We as practitioners need to either get our heads round the stats or get someone in that does.

If you are lucky enough to have spotted a possible disaster heading your way it is essential to plan. Guy Esnouf from E.ON explains that the essentials are to “Plan, Prepare and React” and that all you need in crisis management is “Fence, Police and the internet”. I feel Guy is underselling himself at this point. I’d suggest you should also have someone with the insight and judgement that Guy obviously exerts.

On the subject of pre-crisis Dom Burch of ASDA explains through paraphrasing someone else (I forgot who) “Prebuttal is the new Rebuttal”. In the social web there is no newscycle it a constant deluge and if you don’t catch the wave early, you may never get onboard.

Coming back to preparing, preparation comes in two ways, building your channels, peoples respect and your ability to communicate and also planning for the specific threat.

You can’t just barge into social media as a response to a crisis instead you need to have created a relationship in advance, you need to have engaged, built trust and established your channels. Chris Read from Brew summed it up pretty simply “Build your relationships, especially when you don’t need them”

When planning your response to a particular issue the advice I jotted down from Guy was to fight online with online, emotion with emotion and get your side of the story out there. Imperative to this was preparing a number of responses depending on how your crisis could go because Social Media is quick, and to keep your head up you need to be quicker.

I think the final two bits of advice I picked out of the day came from Dom was the importance of being authentic, don’t do anything that you wouldn’t normally do just as it is on Social Media, be human and finally in regards to Social Media “Go willingly now or be dragged there later””

The slides from the day are available through http://slidesha.re/f7kloj

If I’ve missed anything important, or you think I’ve miss understood any of the points made please feel free to let me know.

My notes don’t cover half of what I learnt on the day and I have no doubt I’ve forgotten the important stuff.  The guys from the CIPR did a great job of organising the day.

I wrote the majority of this on the train on the way home after having a few sneaky pints so this may make no sense at all.

One of the main things I want to get out of the conference, is to understand with social media when should an organisation respond. I’ve always had in my mind the idea that if say an angry customer starts flaming on your wall ignoring them until they go away is a good plan. My theory being that if a customer came into a shop to have an argument you wouldn’t argue with them in public as it’s unprofessional. The social media public shouldn’t really be any different. However, I’m starting to feel that ignoring criticism may just make you look uncaring and snobby.

My next question is at what point would you decide to delete a comment or statement say on a Facebook wall? Of course you don’t always want a negative point sprayed all over you landing page, however, is it more likelly to start a disagreement by removing it and create accusations of censorship.

Interestingly, as I write this @liamfitz is tweeting from the PR week conference and has two valid points.

The second point seems to make sense, I’ve always used the rocking chair test. If it’s likelly to make my grandmother sit up in her rocking chair to start complaining its a bad idea. (my grandmother has passed away now so its more a metaphorical test than anything else)

“Trust social media to be self regulating”  I like the inspiration behind it, I suppose if as an organisation you are putting your customers first and generally playing nice then for every negative comment you are likelly to have an army of fans or social media brand ambassadors that will argue your case for you and defend your honour on your behalf. But does it work?

Researching and writing a history of Portsmouth Students’ Union.

Buying a car.

Planning a student media project.

Finding a real job.

Editing some photos.

Resisting putting my two cents into the student protest debate.

Making a template for a newsletter.