Last week, a friend introduced me to a board game called Space Alert, a game of controlled cooperative chaos. You’re a team, new recruits crewing a tiny, poorly-built spaceship that has to go on 10-minute scouting missions. For those 10 minutes, a CD plays that tells you what problems you’ve encountered – broken computers, asteroids, alien attacks or communications breakdowns – and when you’ve encountered them.
You have a board that shows your spaceship and the various things you can do – charge up the reactor, fire the lasers, power up the shields, etc. You and your team have to work together to lay out on the table a series of cards to plan out in advance what moves and actions each of you will take to deal with every crisis and get home safe.
After the time is up, you’ll flip over your cards and go through the game again to see whether your plans actually worked as intended. Because you play the cards representing your “moves” face down, there’s infinite possibilities for chaos. Did you want to take the elevator down to recharge the nuclear reactor this turn? Whoops, the communications officer forgot to tell you that he already got in the elevator and it’s full. So you’ll have to wait until next turn to get down there and recharge the reactor. Of course, the security chief was expecting to use the power you generated to fire the lasers *this* turn, and now she’s stuck futilely hammering on the “laser” button as they make a sad sputtering noise like a deflating balloon and the enemies swoop in and start shooting…
…really, it’s a brilliant bit of concise, panicked, entertaining game design. And with the professional hat on, it’s a fantastic social media crisis simulator dressed up in board game clothes. At the beginning, you go in assuming that you know what you’re doing, and that everything will go smoothly. For a little bit, it does. But then, when things start to go wrong, suddenly everyone starts talking at cross-purposes under pressure. No one is clearly in charge, and information flows start to get clogged.
In both social and gaming, there need to be structure and processes for resolving each individual issue as well as for seeing the big picture. Before you reply on Facebook to a critic, does legal need to sign off? Are they familiar with the necessary turnaround time for social media? What do you do when other departments or executives start to reply on their own, or show up without complete information and start calling for specific actions? You’re going to get in each other’s way.
In both cases, when a crisis shows up, the response has to be:
- Measured – appropriate for the reputational risks posed by the issue.
- Coordinated – PR is just one member of a much larger “crew.” You’re the communications officer, but if you don’t have a plan in place across the organization to bring in the right people and express a unified brand message, you won’t make the
- Goal-oriented – not responding just to respond, but intended to counter a false perception or address a concern with a tangible end state in mind.
All of these tie back to practice and preparation, whether it’s driven by the bitter experience of previous crises or a staged drill. You wouldn’t go into space without a test run – so why do so many brands venture out into social media without preparing for the risks?
Image is “space alert (3)” by yoppy, available under a CC BY 2.0 license. ©2008