Prevent a company Fail Whale by preparing your brand or organization before a crisis hits.
Your brand, logo, employees and products are all pieces to a whole. When any of these items are not monitored or regulated, a crisis is more likely to occur.
When jumping into the realm of social media, any organization or person for that matter should know to what end their messages will reach. Sure you can type 140 characters into Twitter and simply press the “Enter” key, but what that message contains typos or an ambiguous error? These issues can be resolved by having guidelines and plans in place.
Planning should consist of monitoring, cultivating, preparing, responding and promoting as needed.
To make this issue easier to understand, we will use the example of a made up restaurant, The Lying Cake, that sold unprepared chicken, resulting in complaints of food poisoning online. If a preparedness concept had been created before such an issue, The Lying Cake would know how to keep a level head through the process.
Monitor
When planning for a crisis, know about any current problems that have been reported or ones that could possibly arise. These issues can be monitored through various tools like The Archivist, Google Alerts, etc. Specifically in this example, The Lying Cake would want to monitor the companies name in connection with terms like illness, poor food, food poisoning or even service (to ensure there are no service complains).
In addition to social media sites, mainstream news sites for the surrounding area should be monitored, especially in user generated forums and comment sections. Collect all issues into spread sheets, create graphs to compare negative to positive communications, and collect clips of mainstream media news on the issue.
If there are no known issues at the time, a weekly report of these findings would be sufficient, however, during times of a crisis, reports should be monitored vigorously.
Cultivating
Use the weekly reports to find what people commonly discuss your brand. If one individual is constantly complaining on their blog or Twitter, but has few followers, it’s still important to communicate with them. For people who large followings though, added measures should be put in place to try and rectify the issue. These individuals can out-weigh the impact of even mainstream media, and a simple press release will not solve the issue.
During times when The Lying Cake has few or no issues being reported, it’s also important to continue to update and communicate directly with those interacting with your brands account. Occasionally offering special deals will also be an extra perk for those who continue to follow the brand.
During crisis mode however, it’s important to continue to provide continuous support to anyone that may be an influencer of others. These people are generally defined by the amount of messages produced, how many followers they have and how credible their claims are. Speaking with these people in a personable, but professional manner may win them over. If they are pleased with your brands response, they may repost the information and correct their previous view points.
Interact with everyone during crisis modes, and put more emphasis on heavy influencers during regular periods of business.
The Lying Cake would now be communicating directly with the individuals complaining on social media sites. By successfully monitoring any claim of poor food quality, an issue may be resolved before the mainstream media can react.
Preparing
Preparing for the worst case scenario may seem like a daunting task, but no matter what, someone will find an issue with your product eventually. A official statement on your brands website would be efficient and useful for mainstream media, but social media groundswells can cause much larger riffs in business.
Have a portal for employees involved to locate pertinent and timely information. Everyone involved with the crisis management should be reporting the same information, and include time stamps with each response. Web applications like @Hootsuite are great for collaborating over social media projects. If there are two strategists combating the current food poisoning issue, they can see the exact same information.
Preparation for any issue should involve teaching employees how to use social media. If The Lying Cake has a 20 person staff, they must know certain guidelines to follow to ensure damaging information won’t be released. That is not to say the employees should not continue to use their sites as they usually would, but official statements concerning the food poisoning should only come from the crisis response team (communications department, and managers or brand owners).
Responding
The Lying Cake already has a website, blog, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube account. During regular business it’s important to continue to use each of these social media sites to their best qualities. Facebook is great for images, and news articles. Twitter is great for responding to individuals. YouTube can host your commercials and exclusive videos from fans of your brand. Lastly the website and blog will be a portal of all of your brands social media sites and source of a majority of your content.
During crisis mode all of these tools should be utilized efficiently and quickly. During the BP oil spill they required all of their employees to refrain from speaking to anyone about the issue, and waited far to long before official statements were being released.
Every minute, every second matters.
The Lying Cake during crisis mode would continue to correspond with each claim, with emphasis on those making the largest impact. It’s important to keep in mind that everyone matters, but sometimes it may be impossible to reach out to each person through sites like Twitter alone. Having a customer service e-mail address or hotline would be a more efficient way of addressing concerns, and also brings the conversation back to your own arena. YouTube can be utilized by the brand owner specifically to respond or address particular concerns. These videos often appear to be personable, and show that you are affected by the issue.
Promoting
Utilizing the same keywords as you did during the planning phase, you can purchase ads that correlate with these concerns. As many Internet users still use Google and other search engines to find the most credible and current information, having a promoted ad at the top of these results will reduce the amount of people looking to social media or blogs.
In the case of The Lying Cake, it would be important for all employees to remain positive, and continue to provide valuable information.
The most important concepts of a digital crisis meltdown is remaining timely and factual.
