This is the third and final installment of our series with crisis communications expert Neil Chapman who led crisis communications for BP during the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and is now a senior associate at Wixted Pope Nora Thompson. Chapman gives us his view on how digital media (and particularly social) have transformed crisis communications strategy.

We continue our series with crisis communications expert Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP during the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and now a senior associate at Wixted Pope Nora Thompson. Neil gives us his view on how digital media (and particularly social) have transformed crisis communications strategy.

In 2012, corporate communicators will continue to grapple with the impact of social media – especially in the realm of crisis communications. How can they tailor and adapt plans to take into account a rapidly changing world that expects them to provide information almost instantly, Neil Chapman writes.

We’ve published in the past some interesting pieces of social media research from Mike Schwede who has always taken an interesting look at how the public responds to and impacts the major stories of the day from the Greenpeace siege on Nestle to the shortlived love affair with Pippa Middleton. He joins us here for a look at some big observations for the year to come.

What goes through the human mind when a crisis strikes? Panic? Meltdown? You’d be surprised. During moments of extreme adversity, well-prepared teams can do extraordinary things – identify the heart of the problem, devise a plan of attack and return the operation to “business as usual.” Veteran crisis communications trainer Neil Chapman offers us some key insights, starting with some lessons from a must-read book.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday, famed digital analyst Mark Meeker gave her annual “Internet Trends” address that touched on everything from Greek debt to a long-overdue re-casting of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs putting our digital/mobile needs over self-actualization. Here’s the presentation in full:

Our SEO expert Andrew Shotland spends a lot of time pondering the algorithmic guts of Google Maps. Could it be all that user-generated data it’s incorporating into Maps is making locations actually harder to see? Let’s find out.

Social media monitoring will evolve towards real-time data-driven business improvement based on socialising customer insight within the firm as a whole, not just within marketing and outbound communications.

People often ask, ‘what is employee engagement?’ Most of us know how engagement feels because most days something is likely to ‘engage’ us, either at home or work. When we are engaged, we become focused on whatever subject or task is involving us. We are excited, enthusiastic, energized and more creative. At best we have that fully alive feeling when we lose track of time – what Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”.

I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created. One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership.