Social Simulator: Crisis simulation exercises

Crisis simulation exercises with Social Simulator

The Social Simulator™ is a hands-on, private environment to practice the language, tools and norms of the social web for social media PR and crisis response.

The Simulator uses innovative software to simulate social media debate via a number of commonly used social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, video and online media sources. This is backed up by role-players who simulate the citizen, media and community reactions in a realistic, real time scenario – from scurrilous hashtag rumours to nasty phone calls. The Simulator works with groups from 10-100, and can take place on-site or remotely across multiple locations.

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See how your crisis plan stands up to social media

Use the Simulator as part of crisis management exercise to see how the teams cope with social media inputs. Analyse the profile of the team’s response in a follow-up debrief.

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Practice behind closed doors

Run a full-blown crisis exercise on a private server, behind industrial-strength security. Built-in private messaging keep the exercise off your corporate networks or third party services.

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Rehearse your rapid response capability

Push teams to adapt messages for multiple social media in realtime, including lifelike interactive simulations of Twitter, Facebook and your own website. Handle hostile campaigns, memes and hashtags.

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Handle the full gamut of stakeholders

Test your internal and stakeholder communications, incorporating social media profiles for journalists and key exteral contacts. Push your teams to pick up and route enquiries to the right place, whether they’re customers, journalists or staff.

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Stress-test customer service teams

See how your existing social media management policies fare in a full-blown crisis. Clear your lines of communication between press, PR and digital teams, to ensure statements with the right tone and style can be delivered quickly.

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Respond to realistic media stimulus

Ensure teams across multiple locations access breaking news reports simultaneously, with the realistic look and feel of global media organisations. Handle fast changing news reports which adapt in realtime to reflect the social media discussion around the crisis.

The social simulator creates an environment that looks, feels and responds like a real world event.

Our simulations are designed with you to ensure a realistic and convincing scenario.

Your team will face incoming social media, phone calls, emails and media articles and need to assign roles and develop an appropriate response.

From an adjoining room or off-site, our team will run the exercise platform, adapting the script intelligently real-time to put the team under the right amount of pressure.

Our platform has been deployed to train communications, operations and customer service staff in a variety of sectors with scenarios including:

  • Cyberattack leading to customer data breach and corporate email loss
  • Terrorist attacks on a major transport hub
  • A leaked report spreads anger about a government policy
  • Reports of malfunctioning prescription medication
  • Virulent tropical illness forces relocation of company staff to alternative premises
  • Aircraft crash causing major business continuity issues

How realistic is it?

Working with your crisis team, we develop a customised, branded platform that includes usernames for your teams, mock media articles on duplicates of major news sites and social media characters on social media platforms (usually Twitter and Facebook) that will be the protagonists in the scenario.

The Simulator is a close, but not 100% replica of a number of commonly used templates of Twitter, Facebook and online media sources. In the experience of the dozen or so exercises we have now run for large corporates and government organisations, the teams find the interfaces sufficiently lifelike to be a realistic stimulus.

We will also provide technical support remotely to the teams, monitoring the server and supporting users with any issues they encounter, and providing exports of the materials at the end of the exercises.

“The social media crisis simulation put us under pressure in a realistic way and we learned a great deal about our strengths and weaknesses. Highly recommended.” –John Coventry, UK Director of Communications, Change.org

Exercise over. Now what?

As part of our simulation process we encourage a full debrief of the exercise shortly after it has concluded. Ideally this takes place no longer than one to two days after the event.

A debrief includes:

Analysis of volume, tone, response times and messaging within the platform
Discussion of other emergency service use of social media in comparable scenarios
Suggestions for improved use of technology and capabilities
Provision of a number of case studies related to the exercise

What does it cost?

The Social Simulator is a enterprise-level, customised simulation platform. Since we’re not starting each project from scratch, our costs are substantially less than some comparable services offered by other agencies.

Our pricing is based on a per-platform set-up cost, plus as much setup and deployment support to develop the media templates, social media profiles and scenario content as you need for your organisation. For that reason, it’s hard to give specific costs here but we will happily discuss costs with you for a specific project.





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