When creating a crisis management plan, the first step is to identify potential scenarios that could harm your brand on social media. Consider the sources, types, and impacts of these risks, as well as their likelihood. Technical issues, like website downtime or data breaches, human errors like typos or misinformation, customer dissatisfaction with your service or product, and external factors such as competitors or legal issues are all common risks. By recognizing these risks, you can prioritize them and plan how to prevent or reduce them.
Initiate a comprehensive crisis management plan by identifying potential risks and response protocols. Designate a crisis team with clear roles. Monitor social channels for early detection. Craft pre-approved responses and escalation procedures. Regularly rehearse and update the plan to adapt to evolving scenarios. Transparency, swift response, and unified messaging are critical for effective crisis resolution on social media.
Scenario planning is a wonderful idea for your social media crisis management team. One aspect that can be especially helpful is to analyze how your competitors or really any other company handles a crisis situation on social media as it occurs. For instance, you could create a Slack channel devoted to discussing crisis management stories in real time. It can be quite helpful to discuss episodes as they are unfolding among your team. Some questions to ask and discuss include: What is this company doing correctly? Where could they improve? If the same thing happened to us, how would we respond? Scenario planning let’s your crisis management team practice developing crisis management skills that they will hopefully never need to use.
In order to build a crisis management plan for your brand in social media, first of all, consider what threats may cause damage to the brand. Include technical problems (website down time or hacked), mistakes (typing errors or wrong information input), customers’ disappointment, external challenges such as competitors and legalities. Understand the probability and effect of these risks and help to categorize them and further organize the necessary steps to avoid or minimize them.
The next step is to assign roles and responsibilities to your team members who will be involved in managing a crisis on social media. Depending on the size and structure of your organization, you need to define who will be the spokesperson, decision-maker, monitor, responder, and evaluator. The spokesperson should communicate with the public and the media, representing your brand's voice and values. The decision-maker should approve the strategy, messages, and actions taken in response to a crisis. The monitor should track and analyze social media activity, sentiment, and feedback related to the crisis. The responder should engage with the audience, answer questions, provide information, and address concerns. Lastly, the evaluator should measure and report outcomes, lessons learned, and recommendations for improvement. By assigning these roles and responsibilities, you can ensure a clear and consistent communication and coordination among your team.
In my experience managing reputation and crisis for multiple employers and clients, it is imperative to be responsive and consistent. Leadership in moments of crisis begins with being present and accountable. Being on-message is useful, but being timely, available, and sensitive to the matter is far more mission-critical.
A digital crisis impacts brand reputation quickly. Get your PR team involved pronto ! Ideally the digital and PR teams should be working together on a regular basis. But we have often noticed that on most brands they work in silos. It often takes a crisis to help brands understand that they need to work together to prevent, contain and build from a crisis.
Before embarking on containing a crisis on social media, there should be a proper division of roles of the team. Thus, the roles to be filled may include a coordinator to address the public, an authority to approve the strategies, a watcher to pay attention to the activity profile of the social media, an active participant to respond to the audience and an assessor to measure the impact of the strategies implemented and to recommend any alteration. This helps in easy and effective communication in the event of an incidence and would avoid a mish-mash organization.
The third step is to create a response strategy that will guide your actions and messages during a crisis on social media. This strategy should include a crisis definition, a response protocol, a message framework, and a contingency plan. Your crisis definition should be clear and specific, outlining what constitutes a crisis and how to categorize it according to severity and urgency. The response protocol should provide rules and procedures for responding to different types of crises, such as when, where, how, and what to communicate. The message framework should outline the key points and tone of your messages, such as acknowledging the situation, expressing empathy, providing facts, offering solutions, and apologizing if necessary. Lastly, the contingency plan should cover possible scenarios and outcomes that might arise during a crisis and how to adapt or escalate your response accordingly. By creating this response strategy, you can ensure an appropriate reaction in a timely manner to any crisis on social media.
When building a crisis management plan to deal with your brand on social media platforms in particular, it is advisable to have a proper response plan. Identify the meaning of the word ‘crisis’ and classify crisis based on the intensity level. Define the communication plan that should explain when, where and how the response should be communicated during the various crises. A message framework that should be adopted should include points such as including a statement of the problem, an expression of understanding, facts, solutions, and an apology if required. Finally, it is important to develop an action plan with considerations of possible outcomes that should be taken to increase the chance of a successful response in case of an incident.
The fourth step is to train and test your team on how to execute your crisis management plan on social media. To do this, you should educate your team on the risks, roles, strategy and tools involved in managing a crisis on social media. Simulate various scenarios and practice how to respond using your plan. Evaluate the performance of your team and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. Then, use the feedback and best practices to update and refine your plan. By training and testing your team, you can ensure a smooth and effective implementation of your crisis management plan on social media.
Test your social media crisis plan with simulated exercises. Create realistic scenarios like viral negative reviews or data breaches. Conduct tabletop discussions, use social listening tools for live drills, and role-play different stakeholder roles. Introduce time pressure and debrief after each exercise. Consider external audits for fresh perspectives. Regularly update scenarios to keep your team adaptable. Testing ensures your team is ready to handle diverse crises on social media effectively.
In order to counteract these risks and facilitate effective response in social media, your team must be educated on the risks as well as the roles and measures that are in strategy in case of a crisis. Mimic various crises, rehearse the responses and analyze the efficiency of the team. Make a change and incorporate the feedbacks you received to make sure your team is ready for the implementation in any crisis.
The final step is to monitor and evaluate your results after a crisis on social media. To do this, you must collect and analyze data from your social media channels, such as reach, engagement, sentiment, and reputation. Assessing the impact and outcomes of your response is also necessary, such as resolution, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention of customers. Additionally, it is important to review and report any lessons learned and recommendations for improvement, such as gaps, challenges, opportunities, and best practices. Lastly, celebrate and reward your team for their efforts in managing a crisis on social media. Through monitoring and evaluating your results, you can measure and improve your brand awareness and trust on social media.
Addressing crisis on social media is almost always a team win. Prioritize engagement and response time. Remember that the record isn't just of this moment. It will live online indefinitely for others to evaluate the team's performance during the toughest of times. Positive patterns reinforce reputation in the most meaningful of ways.
If a social media crisis arises there are certain precautions to be taken: It is imperative to monitor and measure the outcomes. Some of the key measurements include the following: The reach, level of engagement, positive and negative tone, and overall reputation of the channels being used must be analyzed to determine the success of the response. Some examples of the evaluation of the results include the customer complaint resolution and satisfaction rate, the level of loyalty and retention rate among the customers. Debrief, evaluate, assess, and analyze successes or failures and areas of future improvement and enhance documentation of the process. Last but not the least; always appreciate the team and similarly, always reward the team.
I once wrote a blog post entitled “How to respond to the customer that just called your brand an ‘asshole’ on social media”. One of the points in that post was to help your company identify a complaint from an actual customer versus a ‘troll’ comment from someone who is not a customer. It’s an important distinction, because if you can correctly handle a complaint from a customer, you can often convert a complainer into an advocate. If the person is an actual customer, their complaint will be more likely to focus on a specific interaction with your company. They can provide exact details about the interaction and past ones with your company. Trolls will use as hominem attacks on your brand, and speak in generalities.