Crisis Management using Social Media

Crisis management requires timely compilation and analysis of a large number of spatial data sources for situation assessment and decision-making. Businesses and public relations practitioners must now be prepared to act at a moment’s notice, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If a business isn’t prepared to act immediately, the issue can manifest itself online, going from perhaps a minor issue to a major crisis in a matter of minutes.

Two key components of any successful crisis management are

• · Preparation
• · Communication

Once a crisis is upon the company , there is little time to think, much less to plan. Crisis plan needs to reflect on how the company will communicate about the crisis and deal with it.The good news is, it’s not that hard to create a plan. In fact, the most important things you need to know were modeled for you in kindergarten. Remember those fire drills? The simple but critical idea was that everyone should know exactly what to do and where to go when a crisis happens, and to practice it even when the possibility of an actual crisis seems remote. Same idea applies to social media. While standard crisis communication tools like press releases, press conferences, and video press releases are still important, social media has its own resources that can help you get the word out in a crisis.

Example: Two Domino’s employees engaged in several health department violations, recorded their activities and posted them to YouTube. The videos quickly “went viral” and consumers all over the web were exposed to Domino’s employees doing a variety of unseemly things to their pizza.

Domino’s Response: Domino’s, in an effort to not draw attention to the video, waited days to respond, and did not bring on additional resources to help. Eventually they started a Twitter account and published an apology video on YouTube, but the damage was already done. Domino’s eventually was able to get the videos removed from YouTube, but did not realize that a majority of the dialogue related to the story was actually happening on Twitter.

Damage: Domino’s stock price dropped 10% over the week costing shareholders millions.

Key Takeaways

1. Quick Response is crucial

2. Address all available channels

3. Have an employee policy on Social Media

Preliminary Assessment of the Crisis

1. If you’re monitoring social media, and you suspect a crisis is emerging that you don’t already know about; start by gathering information about the source and content of the crisis.

2. Is it a customer complaint on a blog?

3. Is it a post by an influential analyst getting picked up on Twitter?

4. Is it one person shouting out to the universe, a percolating dialog, or a raging fire?

5. Is it an opinion: someone hates your company, or a fact: your product blew up and hurt someone? You don’t want to go into crisis mode on every customer complaint that can be managed by engagement.

6. If the emerging story is unclear, and you have the authority and opportunity to engage, take an approach of discovery.

7. Diffuse Customer complaints on blogs by early engagement.

8. If you have an internal crisis that has not yet become public, work with your PR team to craft a traditional pre-emptive disclosure. Then consider how social media can best be integrated into the approach.

After the Crisis Hits

1. Deploy / buy a keyword across major search engines

2. Create and optimize a variety of multimedia content to help tell your story in multiple ways

3. Advertise online with crisis messaging (as appropriate)

The Proactive Approach:

1. Start getting engaged now: Build social relationships with business communities.

2. Build agility among the key departments in company to react.

3. Real time Intelligence: The more sophisticated your tracking experience, the more you’ll be able to discern real threats from fire drills.

4. Create landing pages with neutral and generic language to optimize search traffic. When a crisis hits and someone Googles it, you’ll already be ready with a page in the top results.

5. If you have a blog, write posts that point to your news item and your dedicated page. If you have a Facebook group, and Twitter handles, do the same.

6. Some SEO experts recommend buying search terms, and even domains, with generic crisis terms to ensure search engine positioning when something goes down.

7. Maintain a Facebook, Twitter Crisis group id which is different from the Corporate id. This would ensure that focussed attention from the Company during crisis.

Conclusion: A simple way to approach a crisis situation is to be forthcoming and honest. Communicating to your internal audiences in a timely matter is equally important as employees, board members and shareholders are frontline communicators and need to be reassured that the crisis will be overcome.

References

http://politicsir.cass.anu.edu.au/staff/hart/pubs/40%20Rosenthal,%20t%20Hart%20&%20Kouzmin.pdf#page=7

http://www.igi-global.com/article/factors-influence-crisis-managers-their/47325

http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2009/04/20/dominos-response-offers-lessons-in-crisis-management/