Mark Pimps me out

PR and the Management of a Real Crisis

The date of 5/12/2008 will be burned into the minds of many Chinese in much the same way as 9/11 is remembered as the day the World Trade Center fell. The 12^th May marked one of the largest earthquakes to hit China in the last three decades, however what amazes me is what happened afterwards, especially in a semi-closed economy like China. Within four days of this natural disaster an amazing RMB6.023 billion (USD860 million) in aid was raised to provide relief to those affected by the Sichuan earthquake. (http://snipr.com/29ixo) Another amazing fact is that most of these donation were not from governments (who contributed RMB720 million) but by the general public. Domestic public donations totaled RMB4.9 billion and it is the first time in history that public donations have surpassed the Central Government donations.

The other astounding fact about this disaster for China is the unsurpassed amount of media coverage of the event. What seems to me like weeks of media coverage has really only been less than a week but through television, the internet and social media like twitter and blogs like www.shanghaiist.com the public has been able to track developments, understand the humanitarian effects of the disaster, see rescue stories and generally understand how people have been affected.

Surely both these factors are not mutually exclusive and it is a lesson of the effectiveness of Public Relations and a responsible reaction from media outlets who were given the freedom to report. On evening of the 12^th May, the Chinese Premier Wen Jiao Bao was on the ground in Sichuan and addressing survivors and consoling children who had lost their family in the quake with a television crew. Within minutes footage of rescue efforts and the devastation in the quake effected areas were beam all over the world so that citizens & the public at large could feel the anguish suffered by victims of the quake. One of the first stories that made me physically cry and still now brings moisture to my eyes was the report of 900 children trapped by a collapsing school.

It was these stories, images and footage that made it easy for me to reach into my pocket to donate money to those whom I felt really needed it. And I am not a Chinese citizen.

The next news cycle that I recall was mostly about others who have donated. Stories about people lining up putting RMB100 bills into donations boxes across the country. Chinese communities in countries as far as Brazil taking collections for victims of the quake were played repetitively on television in all Chinese channels. This resulted in contributions from. not only those who can normally afford charity, but even children were reported to have broken their piggy banks to give to the needy.

Over the weekend, it seemed that the international media had had enough of quake news and were mostly reporting about the Bush visit to the Middle East, the continued mishandling of cyclone relief in Myanmar and H.R. Clinton's refusal to quit but, in what appears to be a final step in a masterful PR campaign, the Government has raised the flag above Tienanmen Square at half mast (something that has never been done before for civilian reasons), announced 3 minutes of silence across the nation at 2:28pm today, along with a three day nationwide ban on all entertainment media on TV and the internet to grieve for the loss of life.

When the world who is unaffected directly by this disaster forgets the emotion they feel now, we will look back and see a media campaign that enabled not only the 1.2 billion citizens of China but the World for a week to feel the empathy for the hundreds of thousands of people who will have to rebuild what is left of their lives. A campaign that made it easy for us to be charitable and hopefully a campaign that will make us remember how lucky we are.

In so many conferences that I have run and attended I have heard much about CSR and Social Responsibility but until now it has always appeared that CSR is just another way for business to justify what they do to make money. It is not until now that I have seen PR as a real tool of Social Responsibility. I hope that PR professionals will be able to see what a powerful tool they wield and that they will also have the opportunity to do something that is really worthwhile far beyond manipulating public opinion to protect corporate bottom lines.

Chinese Whispers

I like to think of myself as someone in touch with technology but in reality I am just someone who likes to watch. I like to watch what people buy. I like to watch what people are tweeting and I like to think that I am part of that community of people who talk about internet startups, widgets, web 2.0 and social media, but in reality I am a just a voyeur with a keyboard.

Yesterday I started to watch the discussion on the earthquake in Sichuan. My interest came from my Ayi who has still not been able to contact her parents and her brother in Beichuan. What she knows is that her village was flattened and that the roads are too bad to reach her village and that it is unlikely that her parents survived the quake. To me, this struck a little too close to home. Here is the person whom I employ to look after my child, potentially losing her family. Luckily she was able to get a message from her own daughter and sister via sms and they are okay.

So this twitter phenomenon kind of happened because I wanted to collect as much news as possible so that when I got home I could hopefully bring her some news. Rather than cutting and pasting the links I read, I started retweeting posts from people who had found articles, images or eyewitness accounts so that I could just feed my twitter feed into Google Reader and have all those links in one place.

What I found was that as I was retweeting, people were noticing and then retweeting what I was retweeting. Some people referred to me as live blogging from China and more people started following. I found that strange but then I realised that this was a game of Chinese Whispers where those who heard me and pass on what they heard, so I kept on retweeting people kept on following.

Kaiser who blogs at http://digitalwatch.ogilvy.com.cn/en/ mentioned that there is some discussion about twitter breaking the earthquake story and Robert Scoble also wrote something in his blog about twitter but in reality I was following 3 maybe 4 people actually in Chengdu who were tweeting in English and others who were just scanning the various news sources that actually had journalist at the scene.

I got an email from someone from Aljazeera asking to speak to me about the situation in China and I thought to myself that what I was doing in China today, I could have done in Sydney or San Francisco or from my PDA on a beach in Phuket.

So at the end of the day, It was nice to be noticed for a day but all I really did was emulate what Google Reader already does and that was to aggregate what I was reading and then posting it on another feed. As for twitter, I love what it is, and what it is is just a broadcast sms service delivered over the internet where people share what they are doing, and as a watcher or voyeur, what I have seen is that most people spend a lot of their time just surfing the internet and then letting people know what they have read.

It was an interesting, emotional and thought provoking day today. I'll see you all tomorrow and I will be watching.