I spoke at the PR News Digital PR Summit around Best Practices earlier today at the Grand Hyatt in NYC. It was an interesting event with lots of great content throughout the day. The session that I participated in was “Managing (or Avoiding) a Crisis Online. There were three panelists; the first spoke on online influence, the second on communities of interest, and I brought up the read with a discussion on dark sites.
After the event I got to speak to several attendees and was surprised to learn that the idea of “dark sites” hasn’t thoroughly spread through marketing and communications field. We’ve been recommending dark sites for clients for close to ten years so I just assumed everyone was doing them now. That was a valuable learning for me.
So, what’s a dark site? A dark site is a website that is built in advance and kept password protected to help a company protect against vulnerabilities or manage an issue/crisis situation. If and when a situation requires a public response the dark site is “turned on” by removing the password and is made available via the web. Dark sites have many applications – they are used for all sorts of vulnerabilities ranging from public safety, product liability, anti-trust, legislative, criminal, financial, and many other crisis situations. Dark sites should be built in advance during “peace time” and deployed if and when necessary. In brief, they should have audience specific messages, aggregated social media content, media materials, and two-way communications vehicles such as contact us forms, subscription updates, etc. This is a critically important step in managing a crisis as the dark site is the only place online that you can truly own your message. Having a well-produced and robust dark site is critical to tell your side of the story when a crisis situation hits.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Erin, I don’t know why the adoption has been so slow.
I would think the bigger issue today SHOULD be “making your Dark Sites more social,” freshening them up with the tools and networks people use today (instead of two years ago.)
I’m equally flummoxed that Dark Sites aren’t more prevalent, given that “having a credible voice for crises” is the number one way you can convince big clients they need to be established in social media.
You need a Dark Site AND a Social presence. (Despite the cheerleaders who claim that being “Social” means you don’t have to have a crisis site anymore…)
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:18 am
Interesting Ike. I was glad that people at this session didn’t go the “all social” route, it was a pretty balanced discussion.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:48 am
An excellent idea, if one which perhaps may be a little hard to sell in these difficult times. It’s also very important to note the implications of such “dark sites” in modern times of data archival and indexing by Google and the like. Once activated, it can be difficult to shut them down again (or in less sci-fi terms, to remove the temporary information from the internet entirely, once the crisis has receded).
November 26th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Indoubtly Erin, the dark sites are a good strategy in the way to have the quickest tool to response in a crisis situation. Now the viral communication -buzz, misinformation, widespread in few time, needs frontal attacks. In Mexico, even remains some reticences or reluctancy about the use of the network (web 2.0) There are many challenges
January 26th, 2010 at 6:04 am
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