Weber PR crisis tool enters China, Korea, Japan

It is a software application that simulates public relations crisis situations, including viral media attacks, across multiple social media platforms.

The first three markets it ventured into are China, Korea and Japan, which collectively represent a large part of its Asia Pacific market and client community, and traditionally Asia Pacific hubs.

While these three markets have highly developed local social media platforms, they are very dominant against their Western counterparts. It has no firm plans yet as on which further markets to extend.

FireBell is first developed by Weber Shandwick in North America late last year. The service will also be available in all major Asian languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Jon Wade, digital head, Asia Pacific of Weber Shandwick, noted that FireBell is to social media crises what a flight simulator is to an airline pilot learning to handle emergencies in mid-air.

“Companies shouldn’t wait for a real social media crisis to hit them in Asia to learn how to handle it. FireBell prepares clients so that they know how to react to a crisis online quickly and effectively – without the risk of a serious incident,” he added.

Clients will be able to experience an authentic scenario of being under attack on sites like RenRen, Facebook, Sina Weibo, Twitter, Tudou, YouTube, Naver and Mixi through FireBell.

The drill team develops a plausible crisis scenario not shared with the client. It then builds functioning and fictional offline versions of the client’s social media properties, as well as outside properties such as “anti-fan” pages and contrary blogs.

Using these offline and fictional properties, FireBell projects images that look like the organisation’s social media profiles, allowing the client to witness and respond to the crisis as it unfolds, preparing for a social media crisis before it occurs.

Alistair Nicholas, executive vice presient, Asia Pacific at Weber Shandwick said FireBell would allow clients to address the disconnection between perceived online vulnerability and safeguarding reputation.

He is heading the Asia Pacific crisis management practice in the agency.