Developing a brand message can be difficult. It can be even more difficult to ensure that your message stays consistent across all channels, both internally and externally. And it can be more difficult still when you have a crisis on your hands, without a great deal of time in which to craft messages that address the crisis.
With that in mind, you'll find that a lot of PR pros swear by the old Boy Scout motto, "be prepared"—if you're flying high, it's nice to have a parachute. One such professional is Rachel Racoosin, senior digital strategist at LEVICK. At PR News' Media Relations Conference, Dec. 8 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., she provided the audience with some of her most valuable pieces of advice for planning social media crisis messaging:
1. Prepare in peacetime.
- Identify all potential risks: financial, environmental, operational, personnel, etc. Understand all the risks that could affect your organization.
- Develop a response plan. Tailor it to each of the risks above.
- Create a crisis scoring matrix. This will allow you to triage in the case of more than one crisis at a time and will also help you understand the severity of the crisis.
2. Prepare a dark site. This is:
- A dedicated communications platform that's ready for deployment at a moment's notice
- A clearinghouse for all messaging and facts
- A public place to own the narrative, using statements, FAQs and other information
- Not connected to the organization's main website
- A good example is a dark site addressing data breach, which almost every organization is susceptible to. You can create a site detailing for all of your stakeholders what to do in the event that your data is hacked and possibly leaked.
3. Prepare social media guidelines
- Identify a messaging chain of command
- Approval processes for external messaging
- Have a plan in place to decide why, when and how you'll respond
4. Prepare a response matrix
- Decide who is on the team: crisis leader, digital specialist, attorney, C-suite etc.
- Designate who is in charge of messaging, monitoring and managing—this person must identify, verify and communicate the facts, both internally and externally.
- Develop social media scripts that are pre-written and ready to post for every scenario.
Follow Rachel Racoosin on Twitter: @rachelracoosin
Follow Ian: @ianwright0101