It's not just college students, celebrities, and MySpace’s (News - Alert) Tom using social media as a means to broadcast information these days. Just about everyone, it seems, has access to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn (News - Alert). According to studies done by PwC, while most members use these sites to tag their friends in a status or post a picture of their latest Chipotle purchases, businesses are looking into using the sites to respond to crises, allowing business continuity management practices to further evolve. Yet, PwC also notes that "the majority is still hesitant about using social media as a crisis management tool."
Given the results of the Business Continuity Insights Survey conducted by PwC US, 57 percent of respondents do not use social media when responding to crises. Those respondents that do use social media sites admit to not seeing improvement in their crisis management capabilities. In fact, only about 8 percent of respondents note social media as helpful in identifying and responding to crises.
PwC's Phil Swanson attributes this lack of participation in the social media / crisis management movement as a result of businesses' concerns with possible associated legal and risk factors. “There is some uncertainty around adopting social media as companies are weighing the possible risks and legal complications, and are not seeing how it can be used to help expedite communications during a crisis,” he says. However, Swanson elaborates, noting that as social media progresses in taking the business world by storm and management teams become more comfortable in applying it to their everyday practices, "business continuity management programs will naturally begin to adopt social media for internal and external crisis communications."
Swanson's team encourages its clients to "first look through their crisis communication plan for ways to use social media as an effective communication channel to employees, key third parties, customers and stakeholders. Then, they should look at the more likely crisis and risk scenarios and determine if social media could be used to facilitate crisis identification, internal and external communications, and recovery coordination efforts.” But until the social media environment becomes a comfort zone for businesses, its current users will just have to continue using it to participate in low-risk activities, like Facebook (News - Alert)-stalking former high school flames.