Does your union, in short, have a War Room?
I ask because of something that came up here at Communicate or Die HQ a few days ago. A while back, I wrote a piece on corporate PR company Ragan Communications' seminar on social media and used it as a launching point for a discussion of similar issues faced by the labor movement.
Well in true social media style, they noticed and wrote an article in their subscription-only blog - which we present you here courtesy of Google. In the article, aside from taking a slightly condescending look at our parent company, Prometheus Labor Communications (and oddly, thinking I run the company), they say something very interesting. In the first few paragraphs of the piece, they refer to another corporate social media expert in their discussion of the recently trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee and the United Food and Commercial Workers response to Wal-Mart failure to protect its employees.
They go on to say that Wal-Mart "emerged relatively unscathed in the public domain," but then quote the social media expert, Shel Holtz, saying "Wal-Mart had already issued a statement listing the precautions it had taken, but those facts would have been obscured had the union launched its campaign on Twitter, mobilizing its members to flood the service with a hashtag like #walmartdeath. "
In his blog, Holtz goes on to say "... it would be just plain foolhardy of organizations—from anti-terror security agencies to corporations to nonprofits—to fail to incorporate into their communication strategies the likelihood of a critical Twitter surge targeting their activities."
I think that's a fantastic point.
So, I ask again, does your union have a War Room?
Now, what do I mean by "War Room?" Well, it's a reference to a room in the campaign center run by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos for Bill Clinton's first Presidential campaign - a place where many major strategy meetings were held.
The point of the expression for the purposes of this post is not the room itself, but the idea of a place where there's a focus on all aspects of a modern media strategy. The Clinton campaign used very cutting-edge techniques to manage all aspects of the campaign's media presence ... and much of their media campaign was planned in the eponymous room.
Now, I don't obviously don't care too much about whether or not a physical room is made available for such an endeavor, but I think it's important to have a crew of media experts - including social media experts - that can run public relations for your union.
I know you're all familiar with the basic idea of traditional public relations - it can incorporate a number of things including media relations, advertising and marketing. But as social media technology matures - public relations has come to make use of it - encompassing, as it does, several major ways of reaching people in more direct ways and immediate ways than traditional methods.
So I know UFCW has a media staff. But they don't seem to have a presence on Twitter - which as a microblogging social network - allows for short messages (or "tweets") to be immediately sent by an individual or organization to a list of people "following" the tweets. We've written about microblogging more than once here before. But the Holtz's point is well-taken, if UFCW had media staff that did nothing but bomb lists of contacts that they'd developed in many sectors of society including media and policy circles with communications on Twitter - plus Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and many other popular social media sites - they might have done much more damage to Wal-Mart than they apparently did.
And these technologies, as we've discussed here ad nauseam (look it up), are really pretty easy to use. With some money, and staff, and serious effort behind them, they can be devastating additions to any public relations arsenal.
So it seems worth it to investigate building an integrated public relations strategy for your union - certainly at the national and regional level, if probably not at the local level. By linking your existing media staff together with new social media staff, you can have a War Room of your own to deploy as needed to get your message out to an ever-expanding audience, and go head-to-head with corporations and government more effectively than labor has ever been able to before.
If you want to have a longer discussion about this issue, start by posting a response here. I will close by saying that this kind of service is something that Prometheus may think about offering in the future on a campaign-by-campaign basis to unions that don't have much budget for media staff - if there is a sufficient demand. But for now, let's hear what people think about this.
