Reflections on 9/11 from a Communicator

Everyone has their “Where were you on 9/11?” story. I had just started a job as the Electronic Communications Specialist(!) at a Fortune 50 company here in Minneapolis. I had come to work early that day because there was to be a big company announcement and I needed to be ready to post it to the home page of the intranet…using Microsoft FrontPage.

After hearing news of the first plane crash from my cube neighbor, I listened for an explanation on a radio in my cubicle. When the second plane crashed, one of the executives on my floor opened up her office so we could watch her tiny television.

As was true for most people lucky enough to be a safe distance from the crash sites that day, the minutes and hours passed in a haze of confusion and sadness and shock as we waited for the news media to help us make sense of these events.

One of things I remember most about my situation was that it took until nearly 3 p.m. for our CEO to give us – the Internal Communications team – a statement that acknowledged what had happened and said that employees could go home and be with their families…which we then emailed to the rest of the company.

It was that memory that had me wondering yesterday – between tears each time that State Farm commercial came on – how such a crisis would play out today in the age of social media, so I was intrigued to see this blog post suggesting that the chaos of 9/11 would have only been amplified by Twitter.

You could argue either way, of course. Twitter and all types of social media could definitely have fed into the fear we all felt that day. On the flip side, it could have given us a clearer picture of what had happened and allowed us all to come together more quickly to help.

What I know for sure is that should such a tragedy occur today, employees would not sit patiently by for six hours without word from their leader. Social media has not only sped everything up, it's made it unacceptable for leaders to maintain a wall of silence.

It is now within every leader’s power to communicate, in real-time, as a human being – employees not only know it, but they increasingly expect it. Embracing these expectations isn't just important in a crisis, it's important if you want to compete in this new world of social business. 

Want to learn more? Download our position paper on How Social Media has Changed Internal Communication.