Chicago O’Hare and Midway airports wanted to test their ability to harness social and traditional media channels as part of their emergency public information response to a high-impact incident impacting both airports simultaneously.
We were enlisted to take part in their triennial full-scale exercise in order to test Public Information Officers (PIOs) spread across two Joint Information Centers (JICs), including:
- Examining how two JICs coordinated their public information response by sharing information and harmonising messaging
- Testing how PIOs handled a high volume of passenger and other stakeholder queries across real-time social media feeds
- Testing how PIOs handled a high volume of phone queries from reporters
We used our Social Simulator platform and associated role-play service to enable the participants to:
- Engage with lifelike recreations of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, with our team of role-players recreating the fallout from the incident and interacting in real-time with PIOs
- Post statements to mock-ups of their websites and monitor authentic-looking media feeds, including TV bulletins, radio broadcasts and traditional media articles
- Engage with role-played telephone queries from reporters looking for latest information in relation to the incident
