With the preponderance of social media in the form of blogs or ‘mini-blogs’ (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, even Pinterest) there is an opportunity to revolutionise traditional media’s approach of taking a negative, divisive and conflict-fixated approach. Of course, it has been observed that conflict is what interests people, but that doesn’t always need to be the case. Not being negatively oriented would provide a marketable POD.

The importance and influence of listening on positive organisational reputation is emphasised in a crisis, with social media being particularly useful in this regard to help: identify emerging issues and key stakeholders and influencers; enable speedy communication during the crisis; and to provide information to improve future crisis operational and communication processes (as well as broader business operations).

Leading Australian corporate affairs and public relations professionals are, on the whole, “yet to be convinced that social media represents a paradigm shift for modern reputation and stakeholder management”*. This is despite there being a tsunami of continually building evidence to support the notion that social media is an incredibly fertile platform for engagement, influence and the achievement of business outcomes.

There is a clear choice in how the team that runs the reputational dimension a crisis is comprised: communication and reputation management can be run either as a stand-alone process or integrated into a team that addresses the crisis’s logistics/operations side making it, therefore, a more holistic approach.

Public relations was ignored by Qantas when it recently grounded its entire global fleet, because best practice PR would have seen it: evolve the way it did business by listening to and responding positively to its stakeholders; change the culture of the organisation so it behaved as a partner with its stakeholders; and inform stakeholders of key issues more speedily and effectively than they did.

Whilst the media is notoriously unreliable and is often more prone to spin, bias and subscribing to a pre-ordained agenda than public relations professionals, an Orica Chief Executive quote in a recent Australian Financial Review story, if true, revealed an approach that will do nothing for Orica’s stakeholder management or reputation-building efforts. It’s a quote that belittled local communities and the ‘man in the street’ (prioritising ‘big’ or ‘important’ stakeholders in its thinking).

Marketing communication has the potential to be, at least partially, an application of effective issues management. This is essentially because marketing communication is a proactive, ‘friendly’ mode of communication and may not necessarily raise suspicious hackles from stakeholders.

Try substituting public relations for science fiction in this comment from ground breaking sci-fi author Samuel Delany: “Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be – a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they, and all of us – have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”

There are great benefits for organisations in building up deposits in the stakeholder ‘relationship bank account’, with one of the most important being to mitigate how a crisis impacts on reputation and brand. It’s a straightforward equation: simply proactively communicate and – this being the really interesting aspect – ensure the organisation (operationally and culturally) listens, learns, interacts and evolves.

The rise of social media has created untold new tools and channels for all public relations practitioners. But in the field of issue management it is having a dramatic impact not just on the day-to-day practice of the discipline, but is changing forever an organisation’s stakeholder relationships and the expectations of its stakeholders.