Will the power of the people #SaveBBC6Music?

March is officially the month for mutual blogging. In case you missed it, here is my guest post which featured on The PR View recently.

A week doesn’t seem to go by now without a Facebook or Twitter campaign cropping up “from the people.” But very few of them are actually successful. (Just type ‘Bring Back’ into Facebook search and you’ll see what I mean).

This month, the social networks and blogs are awash with the motto “Save BBC6 Music”.

After the BBC announced inevitable cuts were going to include the niche station BBC 6 Music, as well BBC Asian Network, loyal listeners rallied round in an attempt to keep their beloved station on the airwaves.

The main Facebook groups have already notched up over 100,000 members and the Twitter hash tag #saveBBC6music has been trending near the top for nigh-on two weeks. So how is it that certain causes seem to capture the hearts of the public so?
Ironically, it seems that since Mark Thompson’s proposal to scrap BBC 6 Music, the station has received the effective publicity some argue it has never got, and thanks to this could be pulling in a higher audience than ever since its launch in 2002.

After the likes of heavily documented ‘Bring Back Wispa’ and Rage Against the Machine campaigns, is this really another example of the power of the internet groundswell? Or is the BBC cunningly taking advantage of a good publicity opportunity, as some are conspiring?

Whatever the case may be, it seems that once again, the power of the social media community has made a difference to something in the real world. An article on the BBC’s website on Thursday claimed that thanks to so called “public concern”, the powers that be may be forced to “rethink” plans to axe BBC 6 Music, along with BBC Asian network. Arguably, it’s unlikely that the relatively small yet devoted listenership scattered across the UK would have been able to cause such a U-turn without the power of social networking communities.

It has been well documented that BBC 6 Music represents only £6million of the BBC’s billion pound annual budget, so how much difference can axing the station actually make? Ex Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, seems to think 6 Music will still be pumping out everything from medieval folk to retro funk and soul this time next year. And until we are told this for sure, it doesn’t look like the guys at the top are going to be able to silence the internet noise.

"Be My Guest" blog post by David Clare: CRISES - THE TWITTER EFFECT

Thanks to the fantastic "Be My Guest" campaign, March has become the month for mutual blogging. David Clare of The PR View is the first of a series of guest bloggers on Great Expectations.

In Public Relations crises happen all the time. Hopefully not all the time for your organisation, but in the entire industry they happen quite often.

An organisation would hopefully have some sort of plans to call upon when a crisis presents itself. Quality issues management before hand would see to that. These plans would have information on who to communicate to, how to communicate and more importantly what to communicate. The key to handling a crisis is therefore communication.

Communication has changed a great deal in such a short time. Social Media is the new kid on the block, traditional media and heavy users of old formats were wary of this new medium, many barely recognising it as any more than a fad. Now it is commonly accepted that Social Media is important for communication, since it is the format a vast majority of an organisations publics will use.

In a crisis there is one perfect contender for the method of communication... Twitter. This Micro-Blogging Social Network is perfect in the event of a crisis. Tweets are short and to the point. Information in a crisis is not always available, and going on the radio, television or interviews for print would require spreading any information available pretty thin.

Twitter can update using whatever information available, even with little information it could look more substantial due to the limitations of 140 characters.

Twitter has reported many crises now, The Miracle of the Hudson River Plane crash is a major case study. This story broke on Twitter, and the first image of the plane was on TwitPic - which also crashed, due to the high number of people trying to access the image.

Others disasters have occurred and the stories have broken on Twitter. The Jakarta bombings in 2009 and the Turkish Airlines plane crash in Amsterdam. Some may not break on Twitter, but the publicity is multiplied by the sheer amounts of tweeting. From my own observations Haiti was a trending topic non-stop for three weeks.

What needs to be done now is for organisations to use Twitter more and more in crisis management. The tweets are perfect for updating publics and journalists. It can also help the image of the organisation in crisis. By simply using Twitter it sends out the message that you are willing to communicate, listen and sympathise with people affected. The Marriott group had this exact reaction when they used Twitter to communicate after the Jakarta Bombings mentioned earlier.

So when you create your Twitter plan, don’t just use it for customer service, think of the bigger events that may occur. Plan now for using Twitter in a crisis, and in the unlucky event a crisis may occur it should be a smoother ride.