Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

I attended via conference call yesterday’s GoC Web 2.0 Communincations Community (GCpedia link) event featuring Brendan Hodgson from Hill and Knowlton. He was speaking about how news breaks online and what this means for crisis communications. He led us through the fantastic material he had collected in the wake of the US Airways Flight 1549 crash into the Hudson river in New York:

Tweets during the event were hashtagged – here they are via a Twitter Search for #w2cc. Mostly me blabbing away, with a few others piping up from time to time. For posterity, I’m collecting my own below with added links and additional info where relevant.

NB I joined the call a tad late due to technical glitches, so I didn’t catch the first bit.

So this is about the disintermediation theme — how the rise of the participatory web has disrupted media models, and then the current economic crisis has come along further destroying revenue, creating a perfect storm for the traditional news media. And opportunity for governments and other organizations to reach directly their audiences without relying on newspapers and TV broadcasters.

By “culture of misinformation,” I got the feeling that Brendan was referring as much to the traditional news media as to disgruntled employees powered by easy access to blogging technology. The idea being that newspapers and TV/radio networks are becoming more shrill, more sensationalistic in an effort to be heard in an increasingly crowded media environment.

Overreaction: Brendan noted that the “motrin moms” issue was about a poorly made commercial getting negative reactions in the blogosphere. Nobody was dying or losing their homes or anything. Motrin did react appropriately IMO — they responded within a few days with a straightforward apology, and removed the ad.

For some good info on the Motrin moms swarm, see this post from Jeremiah Owyang.

I didn’t catch everything here. Brendan mentioned some activists who had created a parody of a US government site (snagging the site’s look and feel) during the Bali climate change talks and issued a satirical news relase on it, which apparently fooled a lot of people. This caused the owners of the *real* site to spend a lot of time dealing with this crisis… when they should have been focusing on the Bali talks themselves. Would love to get some links for this, as I’m not familiar with this example and it sounds like a really good one for government communications.

Re: Maple Leaf Foods — the honesty and transparency shown by company president Michael McCain was important here, including immediately going to YouTube with this statement and video of the cleanup effort. McCain showed good leadership in dealing with the issue. Info on the extent of Maple Leaf’s reputation rebound: near 30% rise in opinion rating from August 2008 to January 2009. Oh and here’s a good piece on the crisis from the Globe and Mail.

This last tweet: hope for the best, plan for the worst :+)

Online communications and social media does not yet get enough attention from the federal government (are you surprised?) — public service communicators are still very much focused on traditional media relations. Scant attention being paid to online communications. What I mean is that while there may be lots of online publishing on government web sites, very little attention gets paid to what’s going on in the wider web. This is changing though, as events like this one show.

At this point, the presentation moved into Qs and As. A few highlights:

Back to the disintermediation theme again… looks like it’s one of Brendan’s favourites :+)

It’s true that web 2.0 has made it possible for government communicators to connect directly with our audiences and stakeholders. Collectively, we are only just beginning to see that online communications means more than the corporate website. But implementation will be a challenge, since disintermediation also has brought fragmentation. So we need to do our homework, so we don’t goof up as we approach “being our own broadcaster.” Can’t just slap an RSS feed on our sites and hope for the best…

And here’s a few last tweets from the Q and A session:

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