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Clear and strategic communication is essential in managing a crisis, but where does social media fit into your crisis communication plan?
There are several ways social media tools and tactics can become an integral part of your organization’s crisis management. You can use social media tools to:
- Monitor what is being said about your company, organization or brand.
- Anticipate a potential crisis and avert the crisis before it happens.
- Disseminate critical information in the midst of a crisis.
Though they aren’t perfect, when used properly, social media tools can become a powerful addition to a well-organized crisis management strategy. Here’s how.
Monitoring with social media
One of the least expensive but most effective ways to use social media tools is to listen—to monitor what is being said about your brand in non-media-related realms. You can use social media tools to get alerts when someone tweets about your organization or mentions your company in a blog or within a social network.
Some of the more popular search and monitoring tools that you can use for free (or a small fee) include:
Tweetbeep
You can use this free site to track Twitter mentions of your name, company or organization name; product names; or any other keyword, and receive hourly updates. You also can track link mentions of your web site or blog even (if a shortened URL is used through a site such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com.) The company offers a 15-minute alert option, which may prove useful during a crisis where time is of the essence.
Social Mention
This site will send you free daily e-mail alerts about your brand, company name, a person’s name, marketing campaign, competitor or other key words. You can hone your search to include only blogs, social networks, microblogs, bookmarks, comments and more.
Google comprehensive alerts
Google now offers regular alerts for news, blogs, Web, video and groups combined into a comprehensive sweep of mentions by key word. Yahoo offers a similar tool.
Keotag combs through search engines, tag generators and social bookmark link generators, looking at a number of social sites, including Twitter, YouTube, NetVines, Yahoo and Google.
You can also pay a company such as Radian6 to more closely monitor your brand mentions in social media and to extrapolate deeper meaning from what is being said.
If you are looking to monitor broader trends on blogs, you can try a site such as Nielsen’s BlogPulse. Google has a Trends tool that searches news wires and web sites, and then parses mentions by region, city and language. With Google Trends, you are basically comparing global interest in up to five topics at a time. The results are based on how often terms are searched on Google over time.
Anticipating and averting a crisis
Often when a crisis occurs, it can be amplified by negative messages or misinformation on the Internet. For example, a prank video created by employees at a franchise of Domino’s Pizza quickly went viral, with more than a million views on YouTube.
While Domino’s did not immediately respond publicly, they did respond when it was clear the issue was not going away. This turned out to be several days after they first got word of the incident. The company responded with a video of their own. The CEO expressed his dismay at what occurred and assured consumers that the prank was an isolated incident and that proper actions were being taken. By using social media to disseminate its message, Domino’s was able to leverage the velocity of word-of–mouth, powered by social tools including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They even started a Twitter account to address the situation more rapidly.
Despite minor criticisms of Domino’s handling of the situation, most people agree that the company was able to stem what could have turned into a more long-term crisis by addressing the issue using the appropriate communication tools.
Not every crisis is a major disaster, but even when a few people say something negative online, that sentiment can snowball into something larger. To avert disaster, you not only need to listen to what is being said about your brand in the social media sphere, you also need to respond quickly with a game plan, be consistent, and keep putting out messages as long and as often as needed until the situation is rectified.
Recently, my company helped to launch a contest on Twitter that involved ordering something free off our client’s site. In less than an hour, people were tweeting negative comments about a shipping and handling charge that wasn’t disclosed. The charge, however, was a glitch in the technology and shouldn’t have been there.
Knowing that a few negative tweets can turn into a loud roar, we immediately launched into social media crisis control, which consisted of the following steps:
- Acknowledging the issue and apologizing for the mistake.
- Publicly explaining that the issue would be fixed immediately and that everyone would be notified when the issue was resolved.
- Privately messaging each person who had tweeted about the contest to assure them we were addressing the issue. (Note: We were unable to privately message some people who were not following us back.)
- Publicly addressing the people who we couldn’t notify privately by referencing them with the @ sign and their Twitter name with a personal explanation.
My instructions to my team were simple:
- Admit the error.
- Apologize.
- Take corrective action.
- Give people individual attention.
Not every situation requires admitting error and not every error is your fault. But when you take ownership of the issue, you demonstrate that you are not only paying attention but that you care. In social media, that transparency and care can go a long way to defuse tensions.
Disseminate critical crisis-control information
Another client of my organization was running an awareness campaign that also involved technology. On the starting date of a statewide program, the technology faltered. My company immediately helped to provide current information and ongoing updates about the status of the technical problems and their eventual resolution.
People were able to access this information on the client’s blog, and Twitter and Facebook pages, in addition to their web site. Within 72 hours, the consistent messages and quick responses to questions helped to divert attention from a technical issue and focus more on the solutions to assist those who were affected by the glitch. Instead of spreading the word that the program had failed after only a few days, we were able to keep everyone positive, informed and eager to help by sharing the updates with others.
When social media causes crisis
While social media tools and tactics can bolster your traditional crisis communications, they can sometimes be the cause of a problem. Consider Motrin’s social media video advertisement, which offended some mothers who were proponents of attachment parenting or often carrying a baby in a sling or carrier.
Suddenly, the mommy bloggers—who called themselves Motrin Moms—were in an uproar over what they deemed an insulting message to women who believed in the value of carrying one’s baby close. They formed a Facebook group with more than 1,000 members. They started using the hashtag #motrinmoms on Twitter, which acted as a searchable tag so other moms—and the media—could follow the Twitter conversation.
The company behind Motrin, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, had a representative contact some of the mommy bloggers by e-mail with a personal apology. The company also placed an apology on its web site. While Motrin did eventually pull the ad, they did surprisingly little else in the social media sphere to rectify a messaging crisis that stemmed from a social media tactic.
What could Motrin have done differently? In social media, a negative can quickly be turned into a positive by leveraging the attention and making good. Motrin could have admitted its error, within the social media sphere, apologized to mothers everywhere, and contacted the most vocal mommy bloggers, not just to apologize but to ask them for direct feedback on how Motrin could create a more positive and empowering message for moms. Then they could have used the feedback to create a new, more positive ad campaign, and give kudos to the online mom communities and mommy bloggers for their input.
Within days, they could have turned a lot of negative noise into praise. They could have won over angry consumers and possibly even gained some loyal customers. Instead of being an example of a social media failure, they could have been a social media success story.
Social media brings opportunity
In the age of social media, every criticism now has the potential to become an opportunity to connect more closely with customers and constituents. With attention and care, many crises can also be averted. When a crisis does occur, social media can offer monitoring and communication solutions to disseminate information at a more rapid rate than most traditional media. Used strategically and as part of an overall communication mix, social media can add depth, breadth and speed to your crisis communication efforts.
Aliza Sherman is president and co-owner of Conversify, a social media marketing agency. Sherman started the first woman-owned, full-service Internet company in New York City in the ’90s. Her books include The Everything Blogging Book and Streetwise Ecommerce. |
