At my old corporate job, we had emergency floor captains. Being 12 floors up and if some great danger befell us all? It was the petite five-foot tall chick that was in charge of making sure everyone didn’t hit the ground and start bawling or became Donner-Party-Esque. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it. I had a flag.
When the Haiti news spread across my screen this afternoon- then followed me on the way home- I decided that corporations needed a Twitter Floor Captain. And I was nominating myself.
“Here’s your chance!” I picked up and phoned a media friend and told him that with the developing news on Haiti, there was a twitter market just begging to be grasped. I was taking a break from saving the world after the TwitterCoatDrive, MNJobSummit and the latest #tweetcrawl that ended in a perfect handstand- (which I’m still getting DM’s about.)
Suddenly it was like a great wind gushed through, pushed open the door and I told him:
Take your media and hashtag Haiti. It’s new news. You can make a difference. This is what it’s about. Use your platform: Power to the people! I imagined floods of viewers phoning in saying, “what can we do!” To which said media would state a series of choices, phone numbers or ingenuis ways to use their POWER to help. Instead: I got a strange silence, then this: “We have to get the okay from our PR department.” The flatness of his voice told me he was thinking the same thing I was thinking and suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that companies were just not getting it.
I get the idea that we have to control our bleeding hearts. (Understood.) I even understand the need to bring in our key players when running massive campaigns out of our cars at six pm. Got it- understood. But this ain’t 1972. It’s 2010- in real time, with a constant barrage of “Global Warming!” “Danger!” and my favorite: “Sexting!” We’re so prepared to spill the beans of what’s going on in the world: But so utterly unprepared in how to react to it all.
The perfect human interest piece laid across the screen- an opportunity to grab readership and make a difference. #HelpHaiti or #Together4Haiti or even, (Your Company Name Here) 4Haiti- was born in about 10 seconds.
Welcome to Twitter, folks. If it’s after five and massive news hits? You’d better have a team for that.
When you fail to plan? You just plan to fail. The world runs on realtime now and the days of leaving a blank office and assuming that someone else will take care of your twitter market after 5pm are long gone. Plan for the realtime, organizations. Or the realtime will give it’s best to someone else.
And will someone please… #HelpHaiti?
