College Sports Information Directors of America

Chris Syme (cksyme.org) is CoSIDA Chair of the New Media/Technology Committee and an emerging social media crisis and reputation expert. Below is her recent blog entry.

Syme has just published her first book: Listen, Engage, Respond: Crisis Communications in Real Time. This is a 40-page e-book where Syme discusses how to integrate the power of social media into a crisis plan that will not only help avert trouble, but also build a corps of loyal fans that can help you ease the negative impact of a crisis when it hits. Find more on the book HERE.

Follow Syme on Twitter or reach her via email.

What is the difference between an advocate and an influencer? How will they act when it comes to crisis communications?

Jay Baer, the main man at Convince and Convert, shared an infographic recently on the difference between influencers and advocates. He encouraged his readers to share the infographic, so I thought it might be a good exercise to understand how these two groups influence our understanding of how crisis information might be shared in social media. Jay has written about the subject before here, so this piece was a good visual reminder of his earlier thoughts.

Baer highlights two issues we need to keep in mind: one group has the power to drive action, the other just drives awareness. Awareness in itself is not without benefits, but Baer maintains that we tend to confuse audience with influence, meaning numbers are not a measure of influence, just a measure of reach. The second issue is one of passion. Jay says, "Advocacy is driven by the depth of conviction, and influencers typically are less committed to the product or company than are actual customer advocates."

When it comes to crisis communications planning, we need to keep in mind the effect that each of these groups will have on our message, and what the advantages and disadvantages of each may be.

Influencers will:

• help spread your message and reach a wide audience by retweeting and reposting your information.
• help spread other sources’ messages as well, despite whether they support your information or not.

Influencers may not:

• advocate for your side of the story regardless of whether you are right or wrong.
• gain the trust of their audience (see infographic)
• stay with the crisis, but may forget about the event after the initial burst of information is spread and move on to another news story.

Advocates will:

• help spread you message and reach a wide audience by retweeting and reposting your information (same as influencers).
• probably spread other sources’ messages that only support your position and emphasize information that will help you mitigate your event.
• post their own sentiments that advocate for your position.
• Stay with the event and spread messages throughout the duration of the crisis.

See the infographic with Bauer’s post here.

I’d like to hear your thoughts about the infographic. Which of the statistics strikes you?

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