Twitter, Photos and Your Crisis Communications

Twitter has recently revealed two new features coming to the platform. On March 26th they published the following message to their blog:

“We’re rolling out two new mobile features that make photos on Twitter more social. One is photo tagging, which lets you tag the people in your photo; the other is the ability to include up to four photos in a Tweet.”

Sounds cool right?

But what does it mean for your crisis communications and overall risk?

Let’s take a look…

Twitter photo-tagging

We will now be able to tag up to 10 people in the photos that we share on Twitter. These 10 tags will not come out of our limited 140 characters. So, what does this mean for your organization in terms or risk and crisis communications opportunities?

The risk: A picture is worth a thousand words and at the speed at which a Tweet travels the web, a negative picture can cause a lot of damage to your organization – fast! Now imagine that damaging photo tagged directly to your organization. This can potentially have more of a lasting impact than @mentioning does, since tagging doesn’t take up any of Twitter’s allotted 140 characters and remains associated to the picture as it begins to go viral.

The fix: Monitor Twitter and set your privacy settings to best suit your organization.

The crisis communications opportunity: This can be beneficial for your crisis communications if you’re collaborating with third parties. Visuals are a great way to communicate, both in and out of a crisis, so if you’re using images within your crisis communications and have third parties to tag, make sure your team is aware of this new feature.

Twitter photo streams

You can now share up to 4 photos in a single tweet. What are the risks and crisis communications opportunities that can come with this new, cool feature?

The risk: We’ve just highlighted the damaging impact that a negative photo can have on Twitter. Now imagine that damaging tweet containing not one but four photos – possibly tagged to your organization! The risk involved with this is simply 4 times greater than it already was. If one picture is worth a thousand words, how much of a story can be told with four?

The fix: The most you can do here is monitor the Twitter-sphere in real-time, assess this risk involved with this new feature and arm your team with a plan of action in case it ever materializes.

The crisis communications opportunity: Why send 4 tweets with each their own picture when you can send one tweet with 4 images and have even more of an impact. If you’re using photos to help communicate to your audiences in a crisis, now you have the opportunity to share more at once.

By the way…

“Both photo-tagging and Tweets with multiple photos will display in Embedded Tweets.” – Twitter

So watch out and be ready!