Preparing your company for a social media crisis has one reoccurring theme: speed. In the past when a crisis occurred, there usually was one day, or at least a few hours, to prepare. Today, as we know, you may have minutes. Or worse, damaging news may be circulating before you’re even aware of it.
While social media’s speed is a challenge, there are steps brands can take to be ready. The first simply is identifying potential problems. Social media listening and analysis can be a canary in the coalmine for PR. When you learn of a critical issue early, you can prepare for a more favorable outcome.
Owned and Non-Owned Social Media
To understand social media monitoring for a crisis, it’s necessary to differentiate between owned and non-owned social media. Owned social media includes your company’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram accounts. When someone engages with you on these accounts, you receive a notification.
Non-owned social media is everything else; a virtual jungle of disjointed conversations that defy easy monitoring. These conversations may take place on Twitter or Facebook and not include your company’s official name. They may appear on Reddit, City-Data, 4Chan, blogs, comment sections under articles, special interest forums and more. There are no notifications when your company is mentioned in these places.
Monitoring for Crisis
There are countless case studies where social media crises caught organizations off guard. Often these companies didn’t respond quickly, or at all, and paid a steep reputational price.
Monitoring owned social media can be done via native platforms or third-party response tools. There are plenty available at varying prices. Small and large companies should procedurally require daily channel monitoring. This is critical not only for customer service, but crisis preparedness. Should conversation about your company heat up in a negative way, you likely will be tagged in a mention.
Scans for incoming engagements should be conducted several times daily for owned social media channels. For large companies, the volume of incoming engagements necessitates staff monitoring channels into the evening hours and on weekends. Staffing should be scaled to your company’s average volume on owned channels.
Non-Owned Social Media
Now for the hard part: Non-owned social media. Since your company is talked about in perhaps millions of blogs, message boards, forums and other networks, there’s no way to cast a net that catches all those unstructured mentions in a coherent way. There are a host of free tools, though, and Google Alerts is among the most useful. There also are plenty of paid tools that track and analyze social media data.
Paid social media listening tools typically are necessary for a large company with high volumes of conversation. Popular brands average well more than one million social media mentions monthly. Fortunately, listening tools can analyze large amounts of social media data. Most also have alert systems that scan key words and inform you as soon as the tool’s web crawlers find them. Some tools also detect algorithmic changes and alert you to signals that something unusual is happening with conversations about your brand.
Influencer identification is another key to catching social media crisis early. Your company may be mentioned every few seconds on social media; you can’t keep up with each mention. But if someone who has an unusually large following mentions your company, you want to know right away. A key part of monitoring for crisis is notification as soon as a famous or influential person mentions the company. Most listening tools are capable of providing an immediate alert so you can decide quickly whether to engage with the influencer. Monitoring Competitors and Customers
Situations may occur outside of social media monitoring alerts. When setting up your listening, be mindful of influential voices in your industry. Do you have customers with a high level of influence? They may be holding conversations not directly about you, but are relevant to you. The same goes for competitors. A competitor may get dragged into a situation that your company can use as an early warning.
Crisis or Not?
Once you’ve set up an effective monitoring program, you’ll likely go though growing pains identifying what is, and what is not a crisis. As you fine tune your listening parameters, learn to filter out irrelevant noise.
It’s clear brands should have a crisis plan that includes protocols about who is alerted. Generally this includes your organization’s crisis team. Be careful not to cry wolf. If your crisis team is receiving posts every few days and the crises don’t materialize, the importance of social media crisis monitoring will be diminished in your organization.
When does an incident become a social media crisis? Ask the following questions:
- Could this cause long-term harm to our reputation?
- Could this have a negative financial impact on the company?
- Could this harm employee morale or recruiting efforts?
- Could this result in legal issues?
- Are there environmental, health or safety concerns stemming from this post?
- Is someone with a high level of influence saying negative things about us?
If yes is the answer to any of the above, it’s probably worth consulting your crisis team.
It’s a Crisis. Now What?
As we said above, you may have minutes or days before a social media crisis breaks. For example, if you know there is a product recall or other negative company news that will be announced, you have time to prepare. Whether you have three days or three hours to prepare, there are similar steps that should be taken:
1. Black out your social media: This means no publishing of unrelated content for the duration of the crisis. When a company is in the midst of a storm of negative conversation, publishing product-related content gives the public an impression of an unorganized and tone-deaf organization.
2. Prepare your responses: In a crisis you likely will have many people engaging with your social media channels. Create a list of questions/comments you will most likely receive and prepare responses. Have the planned responses approved so you can avoid seeking approvals during the crisis.
3. Extend responding capabilities: For some companies, this means 24-hour-a-day coverage of social media channels. If you’re a large, consumer facing brand and your crisis is related to product safety, you likely will see a high volume of engagements from concerned consumers. With extended coverage, your team can quickly answer most concerns with pre-approved responses.
4. Measure your social media crisis: It’s easy in the fog of a crisis to forget about measurement, but it’s a critical component. Measuring engagement volume, sentiment and demographics of those engaging and times of posts will help benchmarking for your next crisis. Also measure the most influential people talking about the crisis. This data, when viewed visually, can tell the story of the crisis from a unique vantage point and forecast when it will subside.
After the Storm
Eventually the social media conversation about your crisis will subside and you can return to normal social media operations. While there is no standard time to wait until resuming normal posts, it’s worth noting that when United Airlines faced its well-documented crisis earlier this year, it stopped publishing non-crisis-related content on Twitter for nearly one month. Similarly, it’s important to establish and communicate a date when the crisis is over officially and social content publication can resume.
Within one week of the crisis, while it’s still fresh, create a report that visually shows the impact on social media. This will help your organization better understand social media. It also will help you benchmark for the next time your company faces a crisis.
CONTACT: @iamphilwatson
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