10 Social Media Risk Lessons from Recent Headlines Firestorm Opinion, by Karen Masullo EVP Social Media Risk As the person who is primarily responsible for Social Media Messaging for Firestorm®, I start each day exactly the same way:  I check our monitoring tools for trending topics, and then check various news outlets in order to be aware of what has occurred globally while I have been away from my desk.  I do this to inform, comment, and alert others on our team to emerging issues and crises, but more important, I do this to assure my messaging is sensitive to emerging crises, and to those affected by events. Lesson 1: “Every Crisis is a Human Crisis.” Never forget that every crisis involves a Person; someone’s child, sibling, parent, spouse – someone’s someone.  Every crisis has a face. One must however, be aware of a crisis emerging in the first place.   Le...

Spirit Airlines Gazopt Themselves – and don't appear to care   Social Media Risk Management UPDATE: 05/4/2012 5:00 PM Statement From Ben Baldanza, CEO of Spirit Airlines Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza has issued a statement: "At a time of ever-rising airfares, Spirit Airlines makes commercial air travel affordable for many Americans. A very important part of keeping our airfares reasonably priced is our refund policy. "Every day we seek to balance customer service with customers' demands for the lowest airfare possible. But sometimes we make mistakes. "In my statements regarding Mr. Meekins' request for a refund, I failed to explain why our policy on refunds makes Spirit Airlines the only affordable choice for so many travelers, and I did not demonstrate the respect or the compassion that I should have, given his medical condition and his service to our country. "Therefore I hav...

Sickweather.com Launches in Beta – Being Sick is Social   Social Media Risk "Just as Doppler radar scans the skies for indicators of bad weather, Sickweather scans social networks for indicators of illness."  By Karen Masullo, EVP Social Media, Firestorm Baltimore-based Sickweather says they are a social network with a difference; their goal is to let you know what illnesses are out there, and how likely you are to catch them. "With more and more people turning to outlets like Facebook and Twitter to update their friends and followers as to when they get sick, there is now an immense amount of real time data available on the health of our population," the site explains. Sickweather plans to use that information to create a "real time weather map" of symptoms across the country and from there, offer forecasts of maladies to come. The site, currently in beta, plans to si...