Natural Disasters and Social Media

Last Monday Hebden Bridge saw a month’s worth of rain in two hours, causing  flash flooding in the town centre and in Calrec’s Nutclough Mill. The photo on the right is outside Calrec’s third floor entrance on Keighley Road, which for several hours broke into a rather fast flowing river. Calrec staff waded out to divert as much water as possible away from the factory, which prevented any damage to Production but was quite cold and stinky for the individuals concerned. ITV News covered the event in the news report below (incidentally,  we snagged the bin which got caught in the current – Nutclough Mill is just visable behind the trees in that clip…)

Over the next few days we mopped, cleaned and dried the affected areas and took stock of what had happened. And we discovered that every cloudburst has a silver lining.

Calrec joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago, but when we posted pictures of the flooding last Monday things shifted up a gear – that one post had 196 Shares and 39 Comments.  1,406 people saw it and it had a reach of 19, 581 people! By the end of the week the page had seen an increase of 16,780% on the previous week’s average.

Woo! It’s almost worth orchestrating another natural disaster.

That’s all well and good, but we can also report that within two hours of posting that picture, several customers phoned our UK Sales Manager Jim Green and asked how we were coping (and whether Production had been affected – it hadn’t), and customers from all over the world contacted us with kind messages of support.

If anyone is in any doubt about whether this social networking malarkey is worthwhile, last week has proved that it is.  So, how can we do it better?

We have been working hard on building our social networks for the last couple of years, but what do you want to see on there? What are we doing well? What are we doing badly? Should there be more educational texts? Chat rooms? Pictures? LinkedIn? More floods?

We have a growing community online, and we are striving to involve more people in the things that matter to them. Let us know how in the comments below how to serve you better and help us to make these channels more relevant to you.

And if anyone knows where we can get our hands on a plague of locusts let us know.