Though many companies have acknowledged the importance of using social media for releasing corporate news, managing customer service issues, and interacting with key audiences and stakeholders, the recent New York Times website and app outages highlighted one of the more practical and necessary reasons for maintaining a social presence: crisis management.

At approximately 11:00 AM on Wednesday, August 14, the New York Times, one of the largest media outlets in the world, suffered an outage on its website and mobile application platforms. Speculation from other media regarding the cause of the downtime came fast; it was quickly reported as a hacker attack.

But, whatever the facts relating to the cause, when a crisis hit, even the New York Times needed social media to stay ahead of the story and communicate with its customers, proving that social media can be a company's best resource for doing so—even if the company is one of the largest publishers in the world.

The 24/7 365 news cycle was not going to stop and wait for the Times to get its website and apps back up, so instead of relying on its own online and mobile platforms to report the news, the Times turned to its well-established social media resources to continue reporting breaking, timely news as well as to provide updates regarding the company's own status and clarify/dismiss erroneous news being reported by others.

Through the messages that the Times posted on its Facebook, Twitter, and other pages, it was able to effectively manage the crisis by meeting many of the requirements for navigating and communicating during a crisis situation.

This incident, again, helps confirm the importance of social media in crisis communications.

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New York Times Outage Reinforces Need for a Social Presence in a Crisis

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Sandra Fathi

Sandra Fathi is president and founder of Affect, a public relations, marketing, and social media agency located in New York, specializing in technology, healthcare, and professional services.

LinkedIn: Sandra Fathi

Twitter: @sandrafathi