Written by Thilde Vesterby
There is no doubt that crisis management has changed because of social media. If something within your company goes wrong the world will know – thanks to YouTube and Twitter. Take this very recent example:
Just the other day, on October 15th blogger Jonathan MacDonald uploaded a video to YouTube. The video, filmed by MacDonald himself, shows a London Underground staff member abusing an elderly passenger on a tube station on Thursday. It is a little hard to hear what the staff member shouts in the video, but according to the Evening Standard, he says: “Ladies and gentleman, this train goes nowhere until little man gets off. Because you’re a jumped up little git, mate. I’m not holding anyone else’s journey up for a little girl like you.” And as the trin pulls off, the worker says: “Sling him under a train.”
The video went viral on Twitter on Friday and by Friday afternoon the story was on the front page of the (London) Evening Standard. Even the Mayor of London; Boris Johnson put his reaction to the video out on Twitter:
When researching this story I visited London Underground’s website, but there was no sign of the crisis anywhere. The site has a News Centre, which would be the perfect place to discuss the incident and provide information to all the journalists that no doubt come in to check up on the story – not to mention bloggers like me who want to find out what the company has done to clean up the mess. According to the Evening Standard a spokesperson from the company has said: “We are appalled by this video and will investigate thoroughly and urgently.”
The ideal way to manage this crisis would have been for the a spokesperson from London Underground (or even the guy in question) to do a response video on YouTube with an apology for the staff member’s behaviour, but I haven’t been able to find any such thing anywhere on YouTube. Maybe the London Underground hasn’t realised that viral videos live their own life on the Internet and that this video will pop up in Google search years from now….
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