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In the last decade, there has been a huge explosion in the number of crisis communications experts. (And a similar explosion in crises. I wonder if there’s any correlation there.) Everyone and their mother has something to say about how some agency, organization, company, famous person or regular person should have reacted in their time of need. Cluckers as I’ve called them before, always seem to be there clucking at others’ misfortune like very concerned gossips.

One aspect of our increasingly connected world is that small mistakes or problems get blown way out of proportion (or, if to the right proportion, it tends to happen in minutes, far faster than anyone can reasonably react). Someone, somewhere termed this explosion of vitriol and clucking a Twitterstorm. Lots of tweets, noise, flash and like a real storm, it moves away quickly leaving the target broken and wondering what the hell just happened. A key part of those Twitterstorms is the feedback loop that maintains and amplifies the storm:

The perfect Twitter storm

Definition: a story that starts on Twitter and through a feedback loop with traditional press generates a significant amount of attention across a broad audience.

Best examples: the Blackberry email outage, the Topman T-shirt slogan controversy and the John Lewis Christmas TV ad campaign

And if you’ve ever participated in something like this, some crisis or disaster, you’ll know exactly the frustration of having to respond to same questions, the same tweets, the same criticisms over and over and over again, sometimes even days later.

And if you haven’t, you need to see this great listicle from Buzzfeed (thanks @MarcDrummond!) that details the 29 steps of a Twitterstorm:

1. Somebody, somewhere does something wrong.
10. Somebody starts a petition.
13. People start doing satire about it. [ed. note: cue Hitler photoshopped image)
18. Politicians jump on the bandwagon.
23. Focusing on the key issue, social media “experts” rub their hands with glee at a new case study to write about.
26. Until the next day a celebrity who’s only just seen it and can’t be bothered to check what the outcome was starts the whole thing up again.
27. Fortunately, at this point somebody invents a hashtag game and everybody gets distracted.

It’s this twenty-seventh point that I wanted to bring to your attention. And I say this with the EXPLICIT instructions to NEVER do this.

I wonder why some of those dirty, underhanded crisis communications “experts” haven’t started touting their ability to offer distraction. In this world of short attention spans (ed. note: SQUIRREL!), sometimes the tempest only lasts until something cooler, or worse, or better comes along. Media officers used to be forced to wait until the next news cycle, but now there is the potential to force interest from your particular crisis.

Think of how crisis communications experts would advertise it: I created the #ILoveWhenBoys hashtag and got it up to the third highest trending term!

But no, nobody would ever really do that. Would they?

I’ve been thinking about success in social media a lot lately. What is a successful social media action or campaign, how do you measure social media and what are some examples of good measurement. I’ve been thinking about it for a number of reasons, but one of them is you guys. I like to give you good advice and back it up with either stories (anecdata) or data (real data). That way you can use it as ammunition against those who seek to keep your agency in the stone age (or the late nineties). A key part of touting those anecdata and real data is determining what is successful, and how do you do that with social media?

In the past, I’ve reported out counts. Numbers of followers, numbers of likes, numbers of retweets. The rationale was sound, as it did the same as I’d seen from traditional marketing efforts: number of impressions. But is someone following your Twitter account really indicative of you successfully reaching them? (Similarly, is someone driving by your billboard really indicative of you advertising to them?) Given the number of zombie and resold accounts, probably not. And that’s the issue this article on Defamer makes:

Impressions and uniques mumbo-jumbo aside, there is one major takeaway here: Twitter metrics simply cannot account for whether the show is actually well-received, only how much it’s tweeted about.

…

So there’s no way to tell how many of the 178,500 authors tweeting about Miley: The Movement—reaching more than three million fellow tweeters—actually like Miley and would buy products advertised against the show, and how many—like me—were simply begging for Miley to go away.

On the other hand, there is new research out showing that Facebook Likes might actually mean something, if only in persuading others within a person’s social circle to react positively. (Which, if you know anything about government outreach campaigns, is a HUGE deal.) See this article from healthcarecommunication.com:

According to the report, “liking” an article will almost certainly encourage friends to “like” it as well, even if it’s not all that good. Unfairly criticizing an article won’t have the same effect.

Now, that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really tell us what is successful, just that something Liked is more likely to become successful.

What would be perfect is a way to tie a specific social media message to a specific action. When I post this tweet, did anyone resolve to stop smoking? Did anyone put down their Snickers bar? NSA-like powers that all government agencies are purported to have could help with that, but honestly, we don’t have those powers. In lieu of that, though, how do you define success in social media?

One interesting way that I’ve seen it done was through a partnership of Major League Baseball and Twitter. Instead of tying a social media message or campaign to a specific activity and declaring black or white, failure or success, they measured social media messages against each other and saw which type got the most traction. Which worked best. They asked five teams to rotate through five different types of livetweeting and measure their interactions with their public. They even used the teams non-tested games as controls to see if the tested methods were an improvement. The article has a wealth of data, but here’s the high points:

1) Takeovers (of the team’s Twitter account by a famous person) bring more followers.
2) Vine videos get more retweets.
3) Vine videos get more mentions.
4) Vine videos get more favorites.
5) The use of official (team-sponsored) hashtags were highest with play-by-play

While this might seem like an advertisement for using Vine, MLB baseball and Vine seem to go together quite nicely. What I really wanted to point out was the testing that went into this. Measuring success by counting eyeballs isn’t great, but measuring success by win/fail/black/white isn’t great either. Showing levels of success and what types of messages are more likely to succeed might be where we should focus our measurement efforts.

Game of Thrones might be over for the year, but the weather name games are just getting started. The Weather Channel recently released it’s now annual list of winter storm names. Atlas, Maximus, Titan. Not everyone is a big fan, with my local unaffiliated weather folks leading the eye rolling:

We, like last winter, will not acknowledge the use of the names in any winter storm. We continue to believe that naming winter storms is entirely too subjective and the impacts from storms vary too widely across the country to justify such a use — given a storm in the Pacific Northwest will have different impacts than a storm in Buffalo. Until a concrete, known, objective set of data is made known nationally and produced by a government agency or a collaborative of scientists who are naming storms because of objective criteria and not because of some in-house formula that nobody will know about, we will continue to avoid referring to winter storms by name at this site.

I applaud them for taking a stand. I’m not a huge fan either. But, what can you do?

No, seriously, what can you do?

We, in government, don’t control everything (the last week has been a federal reminder of that), including what people call things. When they want to call some event something, they will. And in today’s social media/viral world, there is very little we can do about it. The Weather Channel has a whole lot of flashy pull over how the public relates to the weather, and if they say this storm is called Quintus, there’s not much we can do about it.

This isn’t the first time we’ve run into naming problems: Snowmageddon was a popular term in 2010 that started with a blog comment. And don’t even get me started on post-tropical Superstorm (nee Hurricane) Sandy again. What we, and other people, call things is a very serious issue, especially in times of emergency or disaster when finding information can be the difference between life and death.

(Seriously, I was talking with Rebecca and Genevieve Williams of the amazing JoplinTornadoInfo at the NAGW conference the other week, and they said that the reason they picked that name was because that’s what people were looking for. Not, “EF-5 tornado destroys town,” not, “tornado outbreak updates,” not, “supercell in Missouri,” instead they wanted information about the Joplin tornado. And we’ve already talked about how successful that Facebook Page was.)

So, what do we do about it? Nothing except realize that it will happen, and we need to be ready to deal with it. You can deal with it by keeping an ear to the ground. As the next big winter storm hits, listen to see if your local news is using the Weather Channel’s names. If so, that might be what the public is calling it. And if they’re calling it that, they’re probably searching online for information about the storm using that name. So be ready to start using that name if you want to be heard. As Kim Stephens says:

Adopt [the hashtags that] others are using. Even if you try to be prescriptive, sometimes people start using a tag that catches on, whether you want it to or not, such as #SNOMG. In this case, if you want to be part of the group and get your tweets seen, you will need to adopt that usage.