Social media: giving you a head start in a crisis

From ter­ror­ist attacks to major cyber­breach­es, the world sud­den­ly seems to be more dan­ger­ous and unpre­dictable than it has been in the last half cen­tu­ry. These alarm­ing events come against a back­ground of polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic insta­bil­i­ty.

On top of con­cerns about the secu­ri­ty of employ­ees, IT sys­tems and sup­ply chains comes pres­sure from investors, clients and reg­u­la­tors to ensure organ­i­sa­tions are ready to act quick­ly to pre-empt or at least mit­i­gate prob­lems caused by these events.

“We find that organ­i­sa­tions often cre­ate their own crises,” says Jake Her­nan­dez, glob­al con­sult­ing direc­tor at Anoth­er­Day, a fast-grow­ing strate­gic secu­ri­ty con­sult­ing firm that focus­es on fore­thought and pre­ven­tion to enable its clients to oper­ate as safe­ly as pos­si­ble.  “Either they haven’t had the time to do any cri­sis plan­ning or they’ve done too much and over­com­pli­cat­ed the process with vast doc­u­ments and com­plex, unwork­able pro­ce­dures.”

Adding to this chal­lenge is the way in which news of an inci­dent is report­ed. Social media sup­ports the instan­ta­neous spread of infor­ma­tion and has made news dis­sem­i­na­tion faster than ever before. Whether it’s a sus­pect­ed ter­ror attack, a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter or a data breach, infor­ma­tion about an event will trav­el around the world in sec­onds thanks to the rapid rise of the cit­i­zen reporter.

Quite under­stand­ably many organ­i­sa­tions have con­sid­er­able con­cerns about social media but, as well as sim­ply spread­ing news about a cri­sis inci­dent and adding to the threats faced by firms and oth­ers, social media often plays a con­struc­tive role. Face­book, for instance, recent­ly launched Safe­ty Check which, it says, is a way for mem­bers to “con­nect with friends and loved ones dur­ing a cri­sis, offer or find help for peo­ple in the affect­ed area”.

It was to har­ness the pow­er of pub­licly avail­able social media, start­ing with Twit­ter as the fastest pur­vey­or of news wher­ev­er and when­ev­er it might be break­ing that Dat­a­m­inr was found­ed in 2009.

Dat­a­m­inr process­es all pub­licly avail­able tweets in real time and detects indi­ca­tions of break­ing events. Using pro­pri­etary algo­rithms and machine-learn­ing tech­nol­o­gy, Dat­a­m­inr sends clients real-time alerts so secu­ri­ty teams can quick­ly pre­pare the most effec­tive response to unfore­seen inci­dents.

Cor­po­ra­tions depend on Dat­a­m­inr to help keep their per­son­nel, facil­i­ties, oper­a­tions and inter­ests safe around the world. Polit­i­cal and ter­ror-relat­ed risks have always been around, but these days the key is the speed at which they’re report­ed thanks main­ly to social media, and the abil­i­ty of organ­i­sa­tions to react with equal alacrity and agili­ty, as they begin to exploit the pow­er of social media as a source of news.

“In this volatile atmos­phere, what mat­ters is the speed of the alert,” says Tim Willis, direc­tor of Europe, Mid­dle East and Africa cor­po­rate secu­ri­ty at Dat­a­m­inr. The com­pa­ny was able to inform its cus­tomers that last month’s Oxford Cir­cus inci­dent, for instance, was not in fact a ter­ror­ist inci­dent, before any­one else.

Fol­low­ing its first alert about the event at 4.46pm, by 5.11pm it was send­ing updates to inform clients that the inci­dent appeared to be con­tained.  As a result, cri­sis man­age­ment teams were able to stand down their cri­sis pro­ce­dures far ear­li­er than if they had relied sole­ly on tra­di­tion­al sources of infor­ma­tion.

We have the Dat­a­m­inr app run­ning con­stant­ly on our desk­tops at Anoth­er­Day and our con­sul­tants have it on their smart­phones wher­ev­er they are in the world

Anoth­er­Day uses Dataminr’s ser­vices to turn the ocean of pub­lic data pro­vid­ed into use­ful, action­able infor­ma­tion that its clients can use in their cri­sis-response pro­ce­dures.

“We have the Dat­a­m­inr app run­ning con­stant­ly on our desk­tops at Anoth­er­Day and our con­sul­tants have it on their smart­phones wher­ev­er they are in the world, so we can all receive alerts for ter­ror­ist inci­dents, cyber­at­tacks or oth­er threats,” explains Mr Her­nan­dez. “We can then use our under­stand­ing of our indi­vid­ual clients’ oper­a­tions to put these alerts into con­text. We can say to an insur­er, for instance, ‘This is what has just hap­pened, this is what it means for you and this is what oth­er com­pa­nies like you have done in sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions’.”

Both Dat­a­m­inr and Anoth­er­Day are brought in by depart­ments rang­ing from the com­mu­ni­ca­tions team, cor­po­rate secu­ri­ty, human resources and, increas­ing­ly, in these days of “just-in-time” deliv­ery, those respon­si­ble for sup­ply chain man­age­ment.

One Dat­a­m­inr client that trans­ports refrig­er­at­ed med­i­cines across Turkey was able, fol­low­ing an alert about polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty in the coun­try, to keep drugs in their refrig­er­at­ed ware­hous­es. Had they been trans­port­ed, they would have dete­ri­o­rat­ed when road blocks delayed the lor­ries, impact­ing stor­age con­di­tions and cost­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds.

“Com­pa­nies are real­is­ing that not only can they reduce their risk, but they can gain an advan­tage over their com­peti­tors that aren’t man­ag­ing such risks as well,” says Mr Willis.

Not only is it imper­a­tive to respond quick­ly to risk when it aris­es, but also to plan for it. Mr Her­nan­dez points out: “Organ­i­sa­tions are suf­fer­ing cyber­at­tacks, for instance, all the time.  But more and more are real­is­ing that they need to be proac­tive in han­dling these attacks.  We’re also see­ing more com­pa­nies address a greater range of risks at the C‑suite lev­el. This means that organ­i­sa­tions can co-ordi­nate their efforts and take a more holis­tic approach.  After all, pre­ven­tion is bet­ter than cure.”