Andrew Careaga and its PR team at the University of Missouri Rolla went through a crisis a few days ago after a graduate student claiming to have a bomb and anthrax was subdued by campus police, then arrested and charged with six felonies.
In his very nicely titled post “UMR, the media and the war on error,” he shares some interesting new facts-of-live about the new role of the blogosphere in this kind of crises:
At the outset, we did not release the student’s name. He hadn’t yet been charged, and we decided that the release of that information should come either from the city police or the county prosecuting attorney. But we did respond in the affirmative when one reporter asked if the student was an international student. Once that was mentioned, right-leaning bloggers like Little Green Footballs and conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh homed in on that fact and leapt to the conclusion that the student must be an Islamic terrorist.
BTW, when LGF starts to write about your institution, be very careful. This blog also caused problems to former University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman.
I was curious to find out a bit more on how UMR handles this crisis with bloggers. I went to the source and asked Andrew to answer a couple of questions (he was the co-chair at the CASE conference where I presented with Joe Hice about crisis communication in a networked world).
1) What did you do specifically to address the blogosphere during this crisis?
Most of our focus with the blogosphere had to do with monitoring only. We checked Technorati to see what was being discussed, and that’s where we discovered that a few popular blogs ( i.e., Little Green Footballs) were pointing out that the suspect was an international student. Consequently, commenters on that blog insinuated that the student must be an “Islamoterrorist”. One morning, I did comment on one blog to clarify why we did not release information about the student’s identity. But that was the only comment I posted. We didn’t have time to do much more than monitor the blogosphere.
2) Why did you decide to post about the event on Visions, your institution’s blog that deals with university research?
This story was spreading across the country, so we wanted to use a variety of avenues to direct visitors to the UMR website to our “official” news site. We posted a link to the UMR news site from Visions and from the Name Change Conversations blog as well.
One of the big issues we faced when trying to post information online once the news broke on Tuesday morning was a slowdown on our server due to increased traffic. Traffic returned to normal after around 11 a.m. CST, but from 9-11 a.m. CST it was busy. Web traffic went from an average of 20,000 sessions (over the 30 days including Feb. 27) to 33,000-plus — so an approximate 65% increase. The news site went from an average of 875 sessions over that 30-day period to 7,442 — a 7.5-fold increase.