Do you have a social media crises management team in place when a disaster strikes your business and turns into a snowball that can affect your reputation online? How are you going to satisfy the demands for ears, hands, and eyes when a crises online turns into a disaster? How are you going to deal with all the negative comments online for everyone to see? Do you have an online reputation management strategy?
Having an online reputation management strategy doesn’t mean that you should only have a monitoring process where you can view what is being said about your business and brand on the social web. If you don’t act on your findings and if you don’t have a team that can help you with a social media crises what are you going to do when you are hit with a crisis? Find below a couple of tips that can help you maintain and manage the overload in work when a crises explodes and to help you manage it effectively.
Use your own team
When a social media crisis hits the fan, many of the tasks that will be produced by the disaster can be handled by your own team of employees with very little training and a social media crises plan. Do you have a team that you can use to help you with this? Be sure to choose people for your social media crises team that won’t fold under pressure and can also multi-task well. Create a social media crises plan for them to follow and also setup a training program for that team.
Listening is vital with a crises
One of the easiest processes with a social media crises is listening to what people are saying on the social web regarding the crises and then responding where needed. If you have a social media crises plan in place, you can set up listening outposts and funnel all the important messages regarding the crises to the proper people in your communications team. If you are not monitoring and listening to what people are saying about you online, make sure you set this up as it can provide you with signals when something isn’t right.
What are you going to monitor?
Monitor all the popular social media channels for questions people are asking regarding your business and products and escalate these to the proper people in your organization. Your team members should have access to all the information regarding the comment/question and also the authority to answer basic questions that really doesn’t require immediate attention.
Having a team that can help you when a social media crisis hits the fan can really help you manage a social media crisis effectively.
Hi Anton, Great read. Thanks. I’m wondering just how much of this stuff is being handled by real professionals and not just by some upstart who has a dashboard managing 120 social media accounts (also known as internet service accounts). I’m putting it out there that Social Media Management industry is hot air and that Public Relations Specialists themselves need to take ownership of this management area, and bring it within their scope immediately before they end up in a museum, or at least their title ‘PR’ does. When a crisis happens, how could I possibly entrust a person who has limited business experience to manage diffusing a communications’ bomb? I personally see this job being done by an old-school PR guerilla. Just my opinion.
That is true J.D.
The only problem with that is that not all the old-school PR guerillas understand how social media works. Well in fact, I believe self proclaimed “social media experts” actually doesn’t have a clue either.
Anton – Have you noticed any good education options for PR Pros? I noticed there were plenty of workshops in the UK for Recruiters on ‘How To Manage Social Media’ but none for Public Relations practitioners, is this something you can do? I’d imagine the goals would be different.