By now we’ve all heard of the unfortunate incident at SeaWorld,  in Orlando Florida,in which a 40-year-old, experienced trainer was attacked and killed by one of their killer whales during a recent lunchtime Shamu show.

While it is a sad event and my heart goes out to all those affected by this tragedy, it does represent an interesting case study in utilizing various social channels as part of an overall crisis management plan.

The first thing that struck me this morning when scanning my tweets, was this tweet from Jason Calacanis:

@Jason: WTF?!! @seaworld is going to keep the killer whale that has killed..umm… THREE PEOPLE in their show! #Boycottseaworld #idiots

Jason is known for his outspoken views on a range of topics, such as angel forums that require entrepreneurs to pay to pitch, and entrepreneur demo conferences that charge a lot. In both these instances he has set up his own open and more free versions of such events.  Whether he is simply venting or decides to take it upon himself to free the orcas or set up a more open version of SeaWorld remains to be seen. However, what is of importance here is that his outburst has opened up a whole string of comments in and around this tragic event.

Scott Monty, who heads up social media for Ford, has posted an interesting set of views about this incident. He points out that SeaWorld was, in part well equipped to deal with the public in that they already had an official SeaWorld Twitter account, Facebook page and accounts on sites such as YouTube and Flickr. They used Twitter and Facebook to put out an official message from their CEO, Jim Atchison.

However, they have failed to reach beyond using these channels purely to broadcast their message and are not doing anything to engage directly with people who are commenting on this incident.

I agree with Scott in this regard and while I can understand that they may be stretched to engage directly with all of those who are making comments, in the case of high profile users such as Jason, it would be in SeaWorld’s best interest to engage with him directly in an effort to get him to better understand the situation. This engagement would also have a flow on, echo effect amongst those who are retweeting Jason’s comments, taking offense at his comments or attempting to create trending topics out of his boycott hashtag.

SeaWorld has also failed to respond to the incident on one of their other twitter accounts. They had set up the account @shamu, clearly as a way to personalize, or humanize their killer whales. As Scott points out some of the tweets on this account were clearly made tongue-in-cheek, such as the one referring to the orca’s predilection for otters for lunch. Followers of this account have come to expect a level of lightheartedness and tweets that were quirky, in a killer whale kind of way.

This account has more than 10 times the number of followers as the official SeaWorld account. It represents an opportunity to engage more deeply with the public in an effort to deflate some of the emotion currently swirling through the Twittersphere. Instead SeaWorld has chosen to freeze the account:

@Shamu: At this difficult time, @shamu will not be active. For Twitter updates follow @SeaWorld_Parks.

As Toyota and the golf industry have gotten to know only too well recently, issues management and its ability to mushroom unchecked through the media mean that any brand, enterprise or personal, should be as well prepared as possible to deal with crisis situations immediately when they arise both as quickly as possible and in a way that takes into account the very nature of the social channels that they have set up and not per some anachronistic PR textbook.

In addition, brands need to see themselves as an extension into and of the community that exists around them and as such need to engage more directly with their various constituents during a time of crisis.