See today’s WSJ piece (B6). The piece describes how some of the big guys—Pepsi, Ford, Southwest—are using Twitter to monitor/measure consumer sentiment in times of crises. As my associate senior fellow at the Society of New Communications Research, Shel Holz, says in the piece, “Social Media has magnified the urgency of crises communications.” Amen Bro.
So important is this tool that, to me at least, any company dealing with the public that does not have a social media monitoring and crises plan in place is guilty of PR incompetence. And soon this will spread to companies in the b2b space. In the 30+ years I have been in this business I have never seen public relations change so quickly or dramatically as it has thanks to social media. It is almost mainstream. To us at Middleberg Communications Social Media is now virtually 50% of everything we do. No doubt this will only grow as social media spreads.
I can’t wait for this September 22nd when Jen McClure and I will release the results of the 2nd Annual Middleberg/SNCR study of journalists’ use of social media. Stay tuned.