When the levee breaks

How do you manage a crisis when all your employees are online communicators?

What to do when the water's rising? On 8 September 2015, VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam was severely flooded in a matter of minutes, forcing the evacuation of seriously ill patients and the involvement of the marines. Earlier this year, the centre's senior vice president of communications, Jan Hol, spoke at a #eacd10 anniversary event in Amsterdam about the online dimension of handling this crisis. He shared with Communication Director about emergency social media guidelines for a crisis, how a disaster can bring people together, and why - in a crisis - everybody is disruptive in their behaviour.


With footage of the emergency being uploaded by employees onto Facebook and YouTube within five minute of the start of the flooding, what were some of the social media lessons you learned during this crisis?

The first lesson you immediately realise is that you’re completely out of control and should just go with the flow. Employees have their own accounts with YouTube, their own social media, and  although, like every other mature organisation, we have a code of social media conduct, when something like a massive water inundation happens in just 10 minutes, everybody is disruptive in their behaviour. The second lesson is to try to at least live up to expectations from your main stakeholders, such as journalists, patients or their family members. Luckily we were in the situation where the crisis came from the outside and we were not responsible for it. If it would have been, let’s say, 10 failures in an emergency room on the same day, then that would be a completely different story. The third lesson I learned is that, if such a crisis comes from the outside and is very visible then it creates significant cohesion on the inside. We had doctors returning from their holidays who wanted to be present and help. Even external parties like the marines helped even though we did not invite them. And those are, to a certain extent, the blessings of the day when you have a major disaster in your regular business operations.

What kind of social media guidelines did you have in place for such a crisis?

First of all, we urge our employees to not talk negatively on their own social media platforms about a colleague, be it a doctor, a nurse, an assistant in training or even a bureaucrat like me. If you want to talk about events that happened at VU Medical Centre on your own Facebook page please do so but in a respectable manner. Also never disclose something which is being shared with you on a confidential basis. For example, our employees participate in all kinds of sensitive studies and we urge them not to disclose those things on their own social media until after it’s been officially disclosed by the survey lead. Usually people honour these requests. But in a situation like the flooding, it went completely out of the window.

Going viral is a parallel with the medical background you have. In your presentation at the #eacd10 anniversary event in Amsterdam, you said “prevention is not an option”. Is containment instead a realistic goal? Once a short video of a flooded medical Centre goes viral, how do you steer the conversation?

I would choose the word “impacting”. “Containment” suggests you can more or less limit it or ensure that it’s not being distributed to a larger audience. What we experienced is that if you start to supply all kinds of messages yourself and they become part of the dialogue between medical specialists, patients and family members, then you impact their agenda. I always knew this as theory but that day it helped us in practice. When journalists arrived at the hospital within half an hour, we didn’t insist on our key messages or our lead story, we just reported the actual situation at that moment in time with the understanding that first of all we always act in the interests of our main stakeholder group, which is our patients.

You also said that the most important social media channels in this crisis proved to be Twitter. Can you say why?

Our website was down due to a huge number of visits for a few hours. Healthcare is very popular on Twitter, in terms of followers and tweets being shared, healthcare is more popular than automotive or even gaming because it’s so often an emotional issue. And it’s an easy-to-use medium that rapidly has a massive audience. So because our internet at that time was down and Twitter was alive with tweets by the media and people retweeting all kinds of things, it became our main channel that day.


Jan will share insights into successfully handling crisis communications at the fourth Crisis Communication Conference held at Quadriga University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, held on September 12 and 13.

Jan Hol

Jan Hol is vice president communications at VU Medical Center. Prior to that position he was senior vice president of communications at Océ N.V. and in charge of the company’s marketing and corporate communications worldwide. He joined Océ from Nuon Inc., where he was executive vice president of communications, a role he started in 2002, and was responsible for internal communications, media relations, public affairs, investor relations, corporate branding and sustainability communications. Previous positions held by Jan include vce president of public relations and public affairs at Royal Ahold and director of internal communications at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. He started his career at the Dutch Broadcasting Company NCRV as a reporter and later as its director of new media. He is the author of several books, including publications on aviation, marketing and the weather, and he has been a board member of the European Association of Communication Directors since the association’s foundation.