Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Plum Creek’s medium density fiberboard plant in Columbia Falls was damaged yesterday by fire and explosions. No one was injured. It’s happened before, and given the grain elevator environment, it will happen again. Both the InterLake and Flathead Beacon published stories on the fire.
But you won’t learn about the event from Plum Creek’s corporate website. Plum Creek apparently supplied all its information through a spokesperson who dealt only with the mainstream news media. That was a mistake, a lesson in how not to manage public information in a crisis. Rumors of dozens of deaths were rife on local social media, reports the InterLake — yet Plum Creek used neither its corporate website nor a crisis management Facebook page (at least no crisis management page that I could find) to keep the public informed. A simple but prominent link from the corporate website’s home page to a Facebook page and/or crisis management page would have sufficed.
Airlines know how to do this. When there’s a crash, especially a fatal crash, or a major incident, they execute contingency plans that include special websites and pages and as necessary, social media. Well managed disaster management government agencies also know how to use the internet and social media. But Plum Creek thinks the internet is only a place to present the corporation’s pretty face and products. And at the corporate level, its managers evidently think a major explosion and fire at multi-million-dollar manufacturing facility that employs hundreds is not that big a deal.