This weekend’s Eurostar crisis will be a watershed in how social media is used in crisis communications in the UK.

Organisations which have previously used social media solely for marketing and brand-building campaigns now know just how important real-time updates on easily accessible social media channels are when they’re in a crisis comms situation.

And since Google has started indexing Twitter, it’s even more important than ever before for organisations to own and use their own corporate Twitter channels to listen, to broadcast the latest news and information, and to engage with people affected and/or interested in what’s going on. It’s resource-hungry. But increasingly expected.

The four main principles for good Crisis Management

The key principles for dealing with crises haven’t changed in 15 years since I started in PR:

1) One person/team should monitor what the outside world is saying

2) Another person/team should get news out via the quickest channels available (social media alongside PA and broadcast)

3) Clearing what you want to say publicly with the lawyers/CEO/people trying to fix the problem is always more time-consuming than the comms team thinks it should be – so get the teams physically close to each other to speed things up

4) A news vacuum in a crisis will be filled with unsubstantiated speculation – which you want to avoid (see 1-3)

What has changed are the tools and channels available, and the speed at which information (and mis-information travels). While Twitter never was (and never will be) “the answer” in a crisis, social media channels are too important to be left solely for marketing or advertising. Not when they will help define how an organization is seen to react when something goes wrong.

Indeed, Forrester’s “hub and spoke” model for social media management bears an uncanny resemblance to a textbook crisis comms team – with people from customer service, PR, corporate comms, legal, HR, marketing and operations all represented.

I would therefore advise any organisation which has adopted social media since their crisis comms plan was last tested to dust it down and, alongside their media relations strategy, ask the following four questions.

1) Do you have a blog template and subdomain ready to add on to your own site – with a very accessible CMS ready for real-time updates where people are most likely to look? (Many corporate sites are not built for the frequency of update that people will expect in a crisis)

2) Do you own your own social media channels and have all those logins to hand, so that the crisis team can instantly commandeer all the channels available to decide which are the best to use?

3) Do you know how to stop all other commercial, especially social media, communications?

4) Do you have people in the core team who can use social media effectively?

Eurostar had plenty of other things to worry about this weekend – which have been well documented (and will continue to be), and once up and running their social media response was effective. But their experience is a watershed in crisis communications: social media should now be at the heart of all major crisis comms plans from the start.

Chris Reed is Managing Partner of Brew , the digital creative agency within the Fishburn Hedges Group. Before setting up Brew his PR experience included crisis comms for the BBC during September 11, and launching the Congestion Charge for TfL.