WhatsApp – why should you use a Crisis Communications Tool, instead of social media?
Martin Petts from F24 has developed the Top 11 reasons why you should be using a specific Crisis Management tool, as opposed to social media.
- WhatsApp is not designed as a Crisis Communications Tool. It is designed as a social media platform/ tool.
- It is important to read the WhatsApp/ WeChat etc. terms and conditions – especially the ‘disclaimers’ section.
- There is no readily available technical support team when you need to speak to someone urgently.
- The WhatsApp/ WeChat service does not have guaranteed availability. It might not be there when you need it most. In a crisis, you want something that is guaranteed to be available 24/7.
- Information Security – Facebook (the owners of WhatsApp) do not have the best reputation when it comes to keeping your data safe.
- WhatsApp is not compliant with data protection regulations like GDPR.
- Communication confusion – it is easy to mix up chat groups and send confidential information to the wrong people (or even wrong company).
- Managing contacts – if someone leaves the organization, you may forget to delete them from a key group.
- Message blindness – users have so many messages (social and business, important and trivial) that urgent messages can be missed.
- Extra functionality needed – there is no audit trail. Your central crisis management team need to be able to review communications being sent to keep track of and log conversations and decisions.
- Latency – WhatsApp still takes time. Messages are sent out to the Crisis Management Team. They send messages to top management for decisions, then they send out messages to staff call tree style. This is too slow in an emergency scenario where you need to contact all staff immediately.
If you want to increase your Organizational Resilience, start with preparing a Business Continuity Plan and check out BCP Builder’s Business Continuity Planning Templates.
