Crisis Management Guide

Using Social Media to
MANAGE A CRISIS

When thinking about all that goes into planning for crisis management, it’s easy to think
of situations that involve police and firefighters, natural disasters, and other devastating
events. While at the time it can seem like the sky is falling down around your organization,
not all crises involve such drastic situations. Either way, the idea of trying to prepare for an
unforeseen event can be rather daunting.
There are two main
reasons why a business
may be unprepared to
handle a crisis:
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First, many companies aren’t thinking about planning for a crisis. It
is easy to watch the news and see a giant company facing an issue
and think, “That will never happen to my company.”
Those companies that have management procedures in place,
aren’t looking in the right places.
Regardless of how your organization defines a crisis –for some it could be a surge in cases
of food poisoning due to spoiled ingredients; for others, it may be a well-intended ad missing
the mark– the one thing they all have in common is social media. Social has replaced
television and newspaper as the major source of day-to-day information. If there is an
impending crisis that could damage your company’s reputation, you’ll likely find it on social
first.
We at NUVI have been helping clients leverage social insights to prepare for, and manage
their way through many different crisis situations. Since we get so many questions regarding
efficient crisis management, we realized that it must be a widespread concern.

That’s why we have come up with this Crisis Management Playbook to
help organizations like yours prepare a plan to effectively manage crisis
situations, minimize the effect, and take appropriate action in real time.
In this playbook, we will
walk you through the
steps to managing a crisis
through social media.
Identify the Crisis
You can’t manage a crisis you don’t know about. The
first step is to know what is happening. It’s natural to
assume that if a crisis is happening around your brand
that you would be the first to know about it. That’s not
always the case. Things can happen quickly, and in a
rush communication can break down, leaving decision
makers unaware of the situation.
Enter social insights.
As mentioned earlier, news moves fast across the
various social platforms. For example, if there is a
problem with your product or service, you can almost
guarantee people will be talking about it on Twitter. Remember Pepsi’s ad
campaign featuring Kendall Jenner? In the blink of an eye people went to
YouTube to post videos mocking the video and calling for Pepsi to take it down.
Keeping a close watch and monitoring brand/ campaign specific keywords will
help keep you in the know. But what about others within your organization that
need to stay informed of a potential crisis?
Setting up alerts to know when people are talking about your brand on social
media is a quick way to know about things that are happening in real-time.
Through NUVI’s latest product, Monitors Enterprise, you can set up alerts to
know when sentiment around your online conversation shifts for the worse, if the
overall conversation around your brand spikes, and even anytime your brand
is mentioned in relation to certain key phrases. You can even have these alerts
delivered via text or email to multiple people.

Understand the Conversation
Without knowing where the conversation started, what people are talking about, and
what that sentiment is, it’s much harder to respond to the conversation. Remember
that whole thing with United? Their first response seemed out of touch and didn’t
seem to be responding to the deeper issue at hand.
Very few companies ever need to worry about losing $1.4 billion because of a
single issue. But what we can take from United’s debacle is that the only thing worse
than having a crisis in the first place is making it worse through mishandling. A poorly
executed ad campaign, like the Dove example below, does enough damage on its
own. But when coupled with a corporate response that obviously didn’t understand
the damage done, or is more concerned with saving face than truly fixing the issue,
well that is a formula for disaster.
This disaster is preventable. Since you are actively monitoring the use of specific
keywords across the various social platforms, blogs, and news sites, you’ve already
identified a sudden spike of negative sentiment. Now, thanks to real-time data, you
understand the conversation and can quickly put together an appropriate response.
In the case of this Dove ad, their social media accounts were quick to acknowledge
their mistake and apologize. They also made promises to be more sensitive in future
ad campaigns. Dove understood the conversation around their ad and understood
what their audience wanted. They were then able to use that information to issue an
appropriate response.

Respond Appropriately and Quickly
Finding the balance between responding both quickly and appropriately is hard to do. On one
hand, there’s the urgency to address the issue as quickly as possible and get a message out.
Simultaneously, a poorly planned response will only make matters worse. It’s vital to gather all
of the information you can quickly so that you can respond appropriately and get ahead of the
conversation. It’s important to know who you should be responding to as well.
Both marketing and PR agencies
are tasked with issuing responses
when crisis ensues, so how do
they walk that line and create
a plan that is both timely and
contextually appropriate?
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Know and understand your audience. Hopefully this is research you do on a regular basis. You
should know who might be upset by this issue and why.
Understand the issue. Using a social listening solution will enable you to see the conversation
as it is happening in real-time. This will make it possible to quickly see what is being said
about your campaign or brand and plan the best course of action possible.
Don’t wait to read about it in the newspaper. You should have your finger on the pulse of your
industry and audience. If you are only finding out there is an issue after everyone else already
knows…well, that’s not a great start.
With the insights you’ve gained from social listening, you understand what
people are saying, who is saying what, and more importantly, how far it is
spreading. Now is the time to respond. You can post something to your
Facebook, Twitter, and blog like Dove did. But don’t forget about responding to
the affected individuals. Reach out, one-to-one, and respond to your audience.

Management and Analysis
Once you have made an initial response, it’s important to keep track
of the sentiment around that response, and then continue to be a
part of the conversation. It isn’t enough to just issue a press release
and then go back to your day-to-day activities, assuming all is fine.
Depending on the size of the crisis, you could experience fallout for
many days or even weeks.
It becomes vital to your management efforts that you continually
engage with your audience. A public forum like social media is a great
way to accomplish this; but beware, it can be a double-edged sword.
Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you are responding to someone who
tweeted at your company that they are hurt or offended by something
your company did or didn’t do. All of your followers and all of theirs can
see this tweet. They will see your response. This can be great PR and
will show everyone that your company is authentic and genuinely trying
to fix the problem. But– what if you don’t respond at all? What message
are you sending? What if your response is totally off the cuff and fails to
really address the problem or worse, that it tries to shift blame and deny
responsibility? Now you have a full-blown PR nightmare on your hands.
An important part of your crisis management plan should be a long-term
strategy for not only fixing the issue, but putting additional preventative
measures in check to make sure it doesn’t happen again. As we
mentioned before, alerts are a great way to keep your finger on the pulse
of your industry. There may be things that come up that affect your whole
industry, even if it wasn’t your fault.

Conclusion
A timely, appropriate reaction is vital to minimizing the effect of a crisis. Social media
can be merciless in the face of a crisis. News is shared in the blink of an eye and
issues tend to snowball and escalate at break-neck speeds. Likewise, social be an
incredibly effective tool to research issues and publicly engage with audiences. It
helps keep you apprised of the conversations around your brand and stay ahead
of a crisis. NUVI has the solutions to help you know when a crisis is happening,
understand the conversation, know how to respond, and then continue to track
the conversation. Real-time sentiment analysis and social listening can make all the
difference in staying ahead of a problem.
www.nuvi.com