We've already explained early on in our project, why it's important to be aware of what's being said about your response to an incident on the web and social media platforms. Truth is, things have progressed in the short amount of time since then.

There can be no doubt as to the value of social media for emergency management and business continuity purposes. They offer: more effective and direct communications tools with your audiences and provide an exceptional reputation management tool.

The key, especially before a crisis even occurs, is to LISTEN + LEARN + ENGAGE. That means having conversations.  



To do so, you must first have the ability to listen and that's where social media and web monitoring tools come in. Some are free and offer you all the basics. They differ in style and appearance, they might be more for Twitter or Facebook, some cover pretty much everything. Here's a link to useful resources.

Examples include Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Netvibes and many more. A pretty good way to start is with Google's suites of products: an RSS aggregator: Google Reader, (here's a link to my shared items on Google Reader to illustrate the usefulness of this tool), Google Alerts to pull stories and blog posts off the web and into your Reader account and Google Realtime to search social media platforms.

Other useful social media search engines include: Kurrently and Social Mention. The key in this process is sending the information you gather to as few places as possible, preferably one spot to make very easy to monitor all the content you want to keep an eye on. More solutions are available here.

Here's a resource that should guide you in this process.

If you want to push your monitoring passed the basic (yet sufficient for most organizations) and go into a broader program and better analytics, there are pay services that are also excellent. Some very good ones are listed in this online presentation.  

Now, all that is only the first part of the equation. You're listening. You also need to analyze all the information you've gathered to determine who has influence among the people talking about you. Who do they reach? Who you should engage with. This is the learning part.

A couple of years ago, I adapted an social media engagement matrix to help the organization I was assigned to, determine when and how to enter into conversations with. 



The above grid proved valuable not only in helping us decide to engage or not on social media platforms but also for dealing with requests from traditional media outlets. One of the good things about the many tools listed above in this entry, is the fact that they can also monitor in real-time, the websites of major news organizations. Here's why you should do that.

Now, in the normal course of business, in routine situations, you maintain good relationships with your audiences and stakeholders and engage in useful conversations with them. In a crisis, the information you have amassed on your key stakeholder and influencers will help you determine who to engage first and help shape public perception in your favour and help counter false information.

This engagement part is also about tone. You need to adopt a friendly, casual tone on social media platforms. Preaching and officialspeak don't work. The only way you'll know what to say and how to say it is if you've already engaged online before the crisis erupts.

Finally, let's not forget the mother lode of valuable situational awareness info that can come your way through social media monitoring during a disaster or a crisis. Read a post on that subject here. 

Remember too that putting together a very efficient social media monitoring program doesn't require lots of money or resources. A great many tools are free and very effective and one person within your organization (an intern?, a young IT specialist?) can set up and perform social media monitoring for you in no time. Better yet, do it yourself.

I spend the first hour of my day at work on my Google Reader and Tweetdeck platforms. Gathering stories I can use, learning best practices and building up a good situational awareness and knowledge base. It's the best investment of my time I can think of.