While every business has its unhappy clients and critics, a smart digital marketing campaign must always have a recover plan to prevent a social media crisis from snowballing and turning into an avalanche. As a digital marketer, you can’t fully control what your clients are saying about your brand online; however, preparing for a social media crisis can ensure that you will not be caught off guard before it is too late.
Before you can start reacting to the crises you will need to identify it first. Make sure you fully understand the situation before you step into the phase of “what should I do?”. Once you have identified the crisis, find out if the people that are talking about your brand are high influencers. What is the medium being used? Is it Twitter? Facebook? A blog post? How is it affecting your company’s image online?
Brand monitoring processes
These questions can all be answered with a couple of Online Reputation Management (ORM) processes that should be in place for your company. If you have proper brand monitoring processes in place, you will be able to do the following:
- Actively listen to what your clients are saying about you online.
- Analyzing the general sentiment pertaining to the issue. Is it more negative that positive?
- Create the appropriate escalation procedure and plan.
- Engaging with industry experts to defend your company name if necessary. Online users tend to trust influencers more than company officials. After tracking your influencers and experts, the next step involves communicating with them to solve the problem.
Key purpose of crisis identification
One of the key purposes of crisis identification at an early stage via monitoring process is to be able to respond quickly. In the online world, your response times needs to be very quick. If a proper social media crisis management plan is in place for your company, you can respond faster to queries and at the same time, prevent your company from the loss of reputation damage.