As the old adage goes, it’s never a good idea to make friends in a crisis, particularly one being played out in front of your eyes on social media. GCs and legal teams should therefore prepare in advance and acquire a thorough understanding of how social media can help and hinder when something unexpected happens.
Managing an organisation’s reputation in the heat of a crisis has always been challenging, but in the uber-connected digital world we now live in, a story can be half way round the world before you’ve got your pants on in the morning.
That said, there are some key principles that will set you in good stead.
Reputations can be forged during times of crisis
Think Richard Branson at the scene of a train crash. Being seen to care, quick to act, and prepared to go further now than you could be dragged later will enhance the reputation of your organisation and personal brand.
Listen up
If you consider your reputation is what people say about you when you leave the room, social media gives you a unique and privileged insight into what your customers and stakeholders really think.
At its most basic form, social media is nothing more than a free, real-time focus group playing out in front of your eyes 24/7. Often your customers are talking about you, not to you, letting off steam, sharing the good, bad and ugly. Your job is to listen attentively.
Brands, regardless of size or scale, need to be listening carefully and spotting increases in mentions or changes in sentiment. They also need to be paying attention not just to mentions of their own brand but their major competitors too.
Act fast
Duncan Gallagher, who heads up crisis practice for the EMEA region at Edelman, noted that 28% of crises spread internationally within one hour and yet it takes an average of 21 hours before companies are able to issue meaningful external communications to defend themselves.
Your first response counts
You only get one chance to make a first impression, so once you have gathered the facts, what you do and say next matters. In 2013, Asda was tipped off by a health professional that it was selling a highly offensive Halloween costume on its George website. It acted quickly, acknowledging a blood stained straight jacket costume called “mental patient fancy dress costume” was indefensible.
The product was withdrawn, taken down off its site, and a sizeable amount was donated to a mental health charity. But this was not before former spin doctor Alistair Campbell, and others, had tweeted their disgust.
Take it on the chin
The temptation in a crisis is to deflect attention to others, hoping to bring them into the fray. It can be frustrating for executives that the organisation has been caught out doing something that’s industry practice or the norm. The media will naturally move there next, but on day one, if you are in the social media spotlight, rightly or wrongly you must face the music.
Artificial intelligence v human instinct
Computer algorithms are good at road sweeping the internet looking for issues, but in my experience, nothing beats the intuition and gut feel of a really good social media moderator. A misspelled name or location can easily throw your monitoring software off the scent. Technology can be used as a very effective early warning system but those alerts need to be escalated to a real person to distinguish the real from the false alarms.
Don’t forget to turn off all other marketing
Most organisations now have more than one set of keys to the Facebook and Twitter accounts. While the PR or social media team may be in charge of publishing updates during a crisis, the digital marketing team or any number of external digital agencies could be pumping out ads on the platform.
Once an issue has been spotted, and it has the hallmarks of a potential reputational crisis, all unnecessary marketing should be paused until further notice.
Don’t over communicate
Striking the right balance between saying enough but not too much is vital. Creating long form content on your website that you can link directly to from social media is good practice. Asda established a “Get the Facts” page during the horsemeat scandal, updating it each day with the names of withdrawn products. It highlighted the company’s openness, was easy to find and was also a place to point the mainstream media.
Previously, Asda created a rebuttal to an urban myth that children were being abducted in its stores and taken to the toilets against their will to have their heads shaved. Asda resisted the urge to place the rebuttal in a prominent place. If you Googled it you’d find it, but if you were none the wiser, it didn’t want to broaden the issue further.
Take a deep breath
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, then you’ll manage social media in a crisis far more effectively. While thousands of re-tweets can feel very uncomfortable in the moment, it’s important to hold your nerve and identify what people are really saying, not just what they are retweeting or sharing. For example:
- Are customers asking for clarification?
- Are they concerned or worried?
- Is it just people passing on a rumour or link?
New world, different media, same old challenge
If you’ve got something wrong, nothing beats admitting it, putting it right, and moving on. Social media has increased the speed of the news cycle and made managing a reputational crisis more challenging, but fundamentally you will still be judged on the old Watchdog phrase:
“What did you do about it when you found out?”
Did you bury your head in the sand or did you spring into action, taking accountability for what had happened and being prepared to take a short-term PR hit to protect your reputation in the longer-term?