Frank Eliason (@FrankEliason), Senior VP of Social Media at Citibank, is a glutton for social media punishment. At his earlier job at Comcast and now at Citibank, he's been in the thick of some really ugly media and community bashing towards his respective employers. At Ragan's 5th Annual Social Media for PR and Corporate Communications Conference in Las Vegas, I caught Eliason answering a question from Katie Paine of KDPaine & Partners, who asked, "How do you measure success when you're dealing with a PR crisis?" Eliason answered with a story from his days of working at Comcast. Eliason was dealing with an issue (he wouldn't divulge which issue it was) that was spiking all over the Internet. He realized he couldn't control what others were saying, but he could control what he was saying. First thing he did was to speak openly and honestly about the issue. He reached out to Gizmodo and offered them up information and let them know that he'll keep feeding them updates. Eliason claimed Gizmodo had a history of speaking negatively about the cable industry. He knew he'd probably have a battle. After he sent the information Gizmodo referred to him as a "Hapless PR Sap." Playing along, Eliason addressed himself as the "Hapless PR Sap" and kept delivering Gizmodo the updates he promised. After that comment, Eliason claimed the dialogue changed and it started to decrease the audience ire. Initially, the issue was so big he thought it could go on for a year, but luckily it ended in a matter of a few days. From Eliason's experience of dealing with PR fires, if you give the audience more information, it kills off this need to investigate and dig further. It actually makes the story boring. In this firestorm example, Eliason's goal was to quell the speculation and minimize the ongoing investigation. Traditionally, success during a crisis can be measured over time, said Katie Paine. If you use a social media monitoring application such as Radian6 you can actually see the specifics of the crisis bearing itself out in real time. In such a situation, watching sentiment is useless because it's all going to be negative, said Paine. What you're hoping for in a situation like this is to see if the volume is going down, and how quickly is it going down.