On this dispatch, we talk with Dr. Andrew Pyle who is an associate professor at Clemson University in the Communication Department. His interests include risk, crisis communication, and social media.
Resilient organizations from a crisis communication perspective are ones that have done their due diligence ahead of time to build healthy relationships with their stakeholders. So they have developed a reservoir of goodwill.
Dr. Andrew Pyle
We learn an unexpected secret in crisis communication. We learn how organizations can become more resilient. We also dive into social media and discuss a life-changing book.
Transcript
Robert:
Opened up the door into the social media listening lab.
Andrew Pyle:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Robert:
What are we seeing? What are we hearing?
Andrew Pyle:
Well, I’ll tell you. The center is listening to the world. We’ve got new social media platforms hitting the app store on a weekly basis, and it’s so much noise.
Robert:
Welcome to the Outfall. This is Robert. Today, David, Amy and I learn an unexpected secret in crisis communication. We learn how organizations can become more resilient. We also dive into social media and discuss a life-changing book that we can’t wait to share with you all.
Robert:
We’re having fun creating these series of episodes we’ve nicknamed Dispatches from our Bunkers. Our guest today is the wonderful Dr. Andrew Pyle, who is an Associate professor at Clemson, in the communication department. His interests include risk, crisis communication, and social media. As you’ll see, he has a large playground to play in. He has something you and I don’t have, a social media listening lab. That’s right. Sounds cool, right? Enjoy.
Robert:
Are there certain themes that you found or discovered through your research that you didn’t think about that successful organizations have been able to navigate crisis, that you’re like, “I’m starting to see something that I didn’t know about before.”
Andrew Pyle:
That’s a great question. I think the first thing that comes to mind is this tension between what might be most effective communication and what the legal department is telling us we need to do.
Amy Anderson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Andrew Pyle:
So there’s all this anecdotal evidence and all of these cases that have shown over decades of research, that the organizations that come out quickly and take some level of ownership for a crisis and say, “You know what? We screwed up here,” or even, “We’re not quite sure what happened yet, but we’re going to do what we need to make it right.” Not even actually saying, “We’re sorry,” necessarily, but accepting some amount of ownership for an event. And then working through that, as opposed to this hard stance that we’re not going to say anything that could be misconstrued as though we might be at fault.
Andrew Pyle:
I’ll give you a specific example of that. Right after the Exxon Valdez went down, so that was 89, a year later, there was an oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach, California. It was a BP oil tanker. The CEO of BP America flew to the site and had a press conference. And he opened his press conference with, “Our lawyers are telling us that this is not our fault, but we’re going to treat it as though it is, and we are going to make this right.”
Robert:
Wow.
Andrew Pyle:
And no one remembers that that spill happened. Their stock increased after that event, it was a non-issue. And the communication scholars looking at that would argue that it is in large part because of how they began that response. And so I would say that tension between what feels like the best option, because there’s these potential legal ramifications if we say anything that could be misconstrued as responsibility.
Andrew Pyle:
whereas people just want to feel heard and understood, and valued. And people who are affected want to know that somebody cares, that somebody is going to try to make this right. And that level of empathy and that level of transparency and demonstrating some understanding, that’s so powerful. But before I started studying this, I would have thought, no, don’t say I’m sorry because then it’s your fault. And that really just doesn’t seem to be the case most of the time.
Robert:
Wow. What does resilience mean to you as far as organizations that are in crisis?
Andrew Pyle:
That’s also a messy question. Resilient organizations from a crisis communication perspective are ones that have done their due diligence ahead of time to build healthy relationships with their stakeholders. So they have developed a reservoir of goodwill. They have built trust and when something does go wrong, their stakeholders will wait. They will be patient. They will look to see what’s going to happen. Trusting that organizational leadership and organizational values are such that the organization is going to do what will be best for his people. And not just look for the bottom line necessarily.
Andrew Pyle:
And so resilience is doing the work ahead of time and building the relationships ahead of time so that the organization has the time it needs and the capital it needs. I mean, social capital as well as actual capital, to be able to make it through, not just to survive a crisis, but to truly achieve renewal and build some kind of new normal on the other side.
Robert:
Wow, that’s great.
Robert:
We’ve opened up the door into the social media listening lab.
Andrew Pyle:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
David Ladner:
What are we seeing? What are we hearing?
Robert:
Well, I’ll tell you.
Amy Anderson:
I can’t take this seriously.
Robert:
Dramatic pause.
Andrew Pyle:
Well, I tried to so hard to just keep a straight face on it. Okay. So the social media listening center, the physical space is a little bit Spartan, honestly. You walk in and there’s some tables with TV set up so that you can have these floating workstations for students to be able to gather and, and pick apart a dataset together and be able to collaborate on projects.
Andrew Pyle:
There’s a long conference table, and then there’s a command center wall, and it’s these giant TVs put up together to have these, this whole wall of screens. And on that, you have a word cloud, you have a sentiment analysis, you have a constellation of topics, and what’s getting the most conversation right now and whatever you’re searching for. And then you have this screen of top influencers who is leading the conversation right now.
Andrew Pyle:
And so on a typical day, those screens are focused on Clemson athletics, Clemson, academics, and that’s just sort of the default. But that space is being used all the time for teaching and for research. And so if you wander in on a random day, when there’s been a class, it might be something about a political race that’s happening because we have students doing in depth analytics on commentary on social media, about a particular political campaign.
Andrew Pyle:
We had a student do an independent study last year on Beto, on his campaign and what the conversation was like. And how he had been able to leverage just incredible levels of conversation about his campaign with a minuscule budget compared to what Ted Cruz was doing. And so that was one thing you would see if you went in there and on a particular day and tracking political conversations is a big part of what has happened in there in the past.
Amy Anderson:
Who was the center listening to?
Andrew Pyle:
Right, that’s a great question.
Amy Anderson:
Is this everyone on campus? Was there anyone associated with campus or has some Clemson link?
Andrew Pyle:
No, the center is listening to the world. So anything that is publicly available on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Twitter or news outlets or blogs, or the comment boards for any of those. If it is publicly available data. so for example, if you have a Twitter account and you don’t have it marked as private, then we can pick up those tweets. Now, if someone has-
Amy Anderson:
So the Outfall will be trending, I presume you all will.
Andrew Pyle:
Yes. I mean, top influencer.
Amy Anderson:
Yeah.
Andrew Pyle:
That’s where it is. So, if somebody has privacy settings of any kind, then, then we’re not, then we’re not getting their data. So during hurricane Florence, I worked with a couple of interns and actually, I was teaching a course in crisis communication at the time. And so all of my students were also involved in this. We went to the social media listening center and class happened in there. And so what we were doing when hurricane Florence was building, it hadn’t made landfall yet, we were going into Facebook groups. So students were doing this manually going into Facebook groups. We were looking at Reddit, we were looking at Snapchat. We were looking at Instagram, we were looking at Twitter. And on one side we were trying to do rumor control.
Andrew Pyle:
So there’s all this misinformation, there’s all these trolls accounts that are just trying to add noise or, or, or spread this information, or just be stupid. And so you were looking for that, but we also had groups going into these Facebook groups that were forming, there were 43 Facebook groups that formed in the Carolinas that we found that were groups saying, “Hey, if you’re worried about the storm, if you’re worrying, thinking about evacuation, if you need resources,” you know all these things. And it was groups of anyone in the PD region, people who were in Columbia, people who are in Charleston, people who are in Clemson, people who were in the upstate. And so you’d have a group with 200 people on it. And then people went, “Oh, wow, 200 people. This is a huge group.” That’s a tiny group and it’s a really small network. And so we had all of these groups and each group was sharing information with each other and not getting these outside sources.
Andrew Pyle:
So our students would go in and would connect the people in those groups with the Emergency Management Division, with these, these entities that had information about the storm information, that was a much better legitimate source of information than what my cousin was posting on Facebook. And he heard it from his friend, Billy.
Robert:
It’s like you’re building a communication bridges right Into these different silos.
Andrew Pyle:
That is absolutely what the purpose of that project was.
Robert:
Interesting.
Andrew Pyle:
And we were able to boost signal. We were able to get official messages from the Emergency Management Division and other official entities to an additional two million Carolina residents.
Amy Anderson:
Wow. Do you think you save lives through that?
Andrew Pyle:
There’s no way to, I can’t say that. There’s no way to know-
Amy Anderson:
But you’d like to think that that was a positive outcome.
Andrew Pyle:
Absolutely. I mean, I would love to think that someone made better safety choices, right?
Amy Anderson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Andrew Pyle:
Or someone was, was able to get access to resources.
Robert:
Andrew, you kind of blowing my mind here a little bit.
David Ladner:
It doesn’t take much Andrew.
Andrew Pyle:
Hey, you’re a certified squatter [crosstalk 00:00:11:29].
Amy Anderson:
I thought this was more passive it’s very active.
Robert:
Yeah!
Andrew Pyle:
I mean, a lot of what we do is passive. All of the political conversations that we follow, it’s passive analysis. We’re just looking at what the conversations were. But the crisis research that we do, it is active because we do want to be making a difference. We want to be finding ways where we can help improve the lives of the people who we’re working for and with. So, in the hurricane Florence situation, we were working for Carolina residents. In the last couple of months, we’ve been working both with the university Emergency Operations Center and with the state emergency management division on some similar things, on rumor control, on trying to help cut down on misinformation.
Andrew Pyle:
So we’re doing similar kinds of tracking. We have these different keyword searches and we’re looking for conversations around anything from people not being able to find resources in the grocery store to people talking about access to PPEs, masks and stuff.
Amy Anderson:
Can you give us an example of what that looks like, say someone’s looking for a particular resource or their information or something physical?
Andrew Pyle:
Yeah. So let me think. So there was an example early on right after places in the US are starting to shut down. There was an apartment complex in the Columbia area that had sent out this notice to all of the residents that said, “You’re going to have to pay X number of months rent in advance or we’re going to evict you,” because people are going to start not having income and we’re going to get our money.
Andrew Pyle:
So we detected that other, other entities also had detected that. And so we don’t know if we were the first to notify state level actors, but we do know that that report ended up on the governor’s desk. And it was part of the executive order was emphasizing the illegality of those kinds of behaviors.
Amy Anderson:
Wow.
Robert:
You see all this going?
Andrew Pyle:
I wish I knew. I mean, it’s astounding how quickly these, these technologies continue to evolve. So we’ve got new social media platforms hitting the app store on a weekly basis, and it’s so much noise. And then every so often one of them picks up steam and takes off. And then the people that developed that particular app get bought out by Facebook, or they get bought out by one of these other companies. And that may have a great payday, but if look at something like Tik Tok. It was just one of many video platforms. And now it’s now not all my students look at is Tic Tok.
Andrew Pyle:
I don’t have Tic Tok. I don’t trust myself with that. I think what we will continue to see are new apps that push harder and harder to find ways to capture our attention and keep it. Because if you’re looking at someone’s app, then they’re making money. There’s a really, really good book that talks about a lot of these issues and the kinds of things that-
Robert:
What is?
Amy Anderson:
I’m waiting.
Andrew Pyle:
It’s called Digital Minimalism by [crosstalk 00:15:10]-
Amy Anderson:
I knew it!
Andrew Pyle:
What?
Amy Anderson:
Robert read the book, loved it. He passed it on to me. I read it. Absolutely love it. Personally, I think it’s revolutionized my life. I think it’s brought a lot more meaning to my interactions.
Robert:
All right, guys, have you read his book Deep Work?
Robert:
Yes! Love it.
Amy Anderson:
Not yet.
Andrew Pyle:
Okay. I taught a class on Deep Work.
Robert:
Get out!
Amy Anderson:
I actually have your webpage up right now.
Robert:
Honestly, deep work reading that three, four years ago for the first time, I think was the difference between me maybe not getting tenure and getting on track to kind of get things figured out with work life balance.
Amy Anderson:
Wow.
Robert:
That’s testimony there.
Andrew Pyle:
It was huge. I mean, it revolutionized the way I approached my work.
David Ladner:
So can I just make the point or the observation though, that deep work and social media listening just seemed completely opposite.
Andrew Pyle:
They are totally diametrically opposed, which is why I no longer have a personal Facebook page.
Robert:
Wow [crosstalk 00:16:18].
Andrew Pyle:
I have really strict rules on when and how I’m allowed to use social media outside of my research because I was burning up hours on social media. And it’s because it is addictive. It is designed to make you spend more time there. So now I don’t have notifications on my phone.
Andrew Pyle:
And I guess in the interest of transparency when everything started with COVID and I started doing really intensive social media tracking for two different groups, a lot of my deep work stuff went out the window. The last month and a half has been pretty rough for my deep work. You’re absolutely right. They don’t go together and it is so much harder to rebuild the deep work habit than it is to fall off the wagon and go back into social media land.
Andrew Pyle:
Well, thanks for having me. It’s fun. You all are fun people.
Robert:
Thanks again to Andrew for talking with us. If you want to see a picture of the social media listening lab, go to our show notes on our website. Also thank you for listening to the outfall. We’ve got some great shows coming up in the pipeline that we can’t wait to share with you. Do you have a good story idea for us? Do you want to be on the show? Go to our website, the outfall.com and leave us a comment we’d love to hear from you.
