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10 social media crisis challenges and how to deal with them

Polpeo

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November 13, 2014 | 5 min read

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The first time most brands get to learn the best (and worst) ways to manage a reputation issue that’s breaking over social media is when it happens for real. All the scenario planning, teamstructures and crisis management plans in the world can’t prepare you for the sheer volume of people you have to deal with, or the exhaustion of

polpeo social media reputation management

a team that’s been under fire from an angry mob all day on Facebook or Twitter, or how that team will react under extreme pressure.

In times of crisis, we turn back to what we know. Armed forces and emergency services men and women know this: in the most extreme situations, your responses to a crisis will be dictated by what you’ve learned to do automatically, through endless drills, rehearsal, associative learning, preparation and discipline.

When a crisis breaks, it doesn’t break over a single channel. It breaks on news sites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, forums, TV and YouTube. The first reporters to any crisis scene are citizens armed with smartphones and a Twitter account. News is flashed around the world in seconds. That means brands and their agencies can’t control a crisis any more.

What we can do, is control how we respond. And we can practise that response so that when a real crisis breaks we are rehearsed, drilled, prepared, and have the team discipline to deal with it effectively.

In a live situation you don’t have time to get every tweet approved by a lawyer and a corporate communications team. You have around 15 minutes to respond to a crisis breaking on Twitter, and 30 minutes on Facebook. That really doesn’t give you much time to prepare a strategy for dealing with the situation on social media. In a crisis, you have to think quickly.

You’re battling your brain’s natural response to a threat – flight, shutting down your mirror neurons – which means you’re less sensitive to the needs of others around you. You become inward looking, ready to flee.

Rational thought goes out of the window . This isn’t the time to be reading long crisis plans. And you need the confidence that what you’re going to do is going to

make the situation better, not worse.

When we run social media crisis simulations, we see the same challenges cropping up again and again among crisis teams:

1. Speed of response. Most companies find it really hard to get a response out on social media within that critical first 15 minutes. You can only do that if you’ve prepared. Twitter is usually the first place you’ll need to respond.

2. Tone of voice. Social channels are (mostly) personal feeds. An overly corporate tone of voice has no place there. Brands spend so much time and effort creating connections with followers, and that can all go to the wall with the wrong tone in a crisis.

3. Think about who your audience is. If they’re concerned relatives worried about the welfare of their loved ones, a corporate message will antagonise them.

4. Be authentic. Show empathy to those affected by the crisis, before you do anything else. You need people on your side, and you’ll only get them there if you genuinely care about what they’re going through.

5. Don’t be goaded into responding to abusive posts. If you’re team’s tired, give them regular breaks. They’re less likely to make a mistake.

6. Don’t make the situation worse and create a firestorm. If you have a local, contained issue in Toronto, don’t broadcast it to millions of people across the globe on Twitter.

7. Be the voice of authority in the crisis. Communicating facts as they come in is often better than waiting for everything to go into a single statement. If you wait, people will go somewhere else for their information.

8. Don’t forget your employees. They could make or break your reputation.

9. Be clear, and give context to everything you post.

10. And finally, collaborate. The teams who do best in a crisis are those who listen to each other.

Kate Hartley, COO, Polpeo

Tel: +44 (0) 203 178 7160

Email: info@polpeo.com

Web: www.polpeo.com

Twitter: @Polpeo

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