The life of a PR practitioner can be an extremely stressful one especially during a crisis. In an age where we are striving to use technology to make our lives easier surely there is a way to make the life of a PR practitoner a bit easier even if not any less stressful. When a crisis strikes an organisation the press office will go into overdrive the first thing that people will want is clear and concise information regarding the incident or crisis and failure to deliver this information will result in frustration and resentment towards the organisation especially if the crisis is impacting on the public directly. Now in the days before the internet information would be slow leaving an organisation and it could take days for them to get the corrrect information out but these days PR practitoneres have the benefit of the internet and information can be released as soon as its gotten.
A good recent example is Samsung who ran into trouble with one of there smartphone models, The Galaxy Note 7. The phone has a fault which causes the battery to explode which is extremely dangerous as the batteries contain acid. Samsung's press office relied heavily on social media particulalry on Twitter to release information in a quick and timely fasion
Twitter is a great tool for an organisation in crisis due to it's ease of access to the public and how quickly the message can be spread. People were demanding answers from Samsung over this fault and by using Twitter they were able to respond giving information in quick snappy updates. Before Twitter this would have been a much more difficult and drawn out process and would have taken a lot more time to spread the message you wanted.
This is just one example of how social media can be of benefit to an organisation during a crisis. There are many more and they all show us the same example and that is that it is no longer acceptable to be slow or unreliable in the publishing of important information especially in a crisis, The tools of communication are there for all to use and when something goes wrong, especially in a scenario where public safety is effected eg. The Samsung case, organisations have the power to reach a lot of people who may be effected very quickly and its fair to say there is no longer an excuse for slow communication.
This is just one example of how social media can be of benefit to an organisation during a crisis. There are many more and they all show us the same example and that is that it is no longer acceptable to be slow or unreliable in the publishing of important information especially in a crisis, The tools of communication are there for all to use and when something goes wrong, especially in a scenario where public safety is effected eg. The Samsung case, organisations have the power to reach a lot of people who may be effected very quickly and its fair to say there is no longer an excuse for slow communication.
References:
https://www.newswhip.com/2016/11/respond-pr-crisis-social-media/
https://twitter.com/SamsungMobile?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
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