By Pascal Beucler, SVP and Chief Strategy Officer, MSLGROUP – and Gaurav Mishra, Asia Director of Social Media, MSLGROUP

Pascal Beucler

The decade has witnessed a profound erosion of trust in all types of institutions, including governments and corporations. All over the world, “the other 99%” are protesting against greedy corporations, short-sighted politicians and corrupt dictators. We are also seeing anger against the inability of governments and corporations to show the will to work together solve our most pressing problems: the threat to our planet’s fragile ecosystem, the tradeoffs between economic progress and wellness, and the barriers to achieve the full human potential.

At the same time, people have new sources of power, as individuals and communities. People believe that only they themselves can come up with innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. People are leveraging social media platforms to not only create new public spaces for discourse and dissent, but also collaborate across continents to coordinate participation and action and act as catalysts for positive change. Finally, people are demanding that governments and corporations work together to create an ecosystem that recognizes this shift of power and enables participation from people, as employees, consumers and citizens.

Gaurav Mishra

The social web is playing an important role in these shifts around trust, power, risk and crisis. Specifically, corporations need to master three interplays shaping crisis in the “new normal”: the interplay between mainstream media and social media, the interplay between local and global dynamics, and the interplay between crisis planning and response.

In a world where every crisis is global, social and viral, it’s critical to tap into the tools and insights from across our global network, in real time.  MSLGROUP Crisis Network is a global network of 50+ MSLGROUP crisis experts, with deep vertical expertise across industries and geographies, connected to each other by our proprietary crowdsourcing platform.

Our experts can not only tap into each other’s insights in real time, but also leverage our proprietary crisis toolkit – including our crisis planning framework and our crisis simulation workshop — to help our clients plan for and respond to crisis situations effectively.

In a world where every crisis is global, social and viral, here’s a roadmap to think about the interconnections between trust, power, risk and crisis, from our experts at the MSLGROUP Crisis Network.

In the first section, we explore how social media is changing trust, power, risk and crisis. We start by looking at the role of social media in societal upheavals in the West, including the terrorist attack in Norway, the riots in London and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. Then, we move to the East and look at how social media is changing the news ecosystem in China, eroding the wasta system of personal influence in the Middle East and uniting the Indian middle class in a grassroots movement against corruption.

In the second section, we outline how corporations can leverage social media to manage risk and reputation. We outline how social media can play a role at each stage in the crisis curve, describe the art and science of crisis simulation, recommend engaging third party influencers in crisis planning, share lessons from managing the global Crisis Command Center for BP, provide a playbook for handling a crisis on Facebook and end with tips and tricks on crisis management from our network of senior trusted advisors.

We sincerely hope that the insights and foresights we are bringing here will be useful to you. To know more about the MSLGROUP Crisis Network, or to subscribe to receive similar insights and foresights in the form of a quarterly newsletter, please visit http://crisis.mslgroup.com.