How can you manage influencer marketing during a crisis?

Encourage influencers to share their own personal stories about how the crisis has affected them and their communities. This can help to humanize the crisis and make it more relatable to your audience.

There is an explosion in social influencer engagement. It has become the lowest hanging fruit and brands are spending. However, in my practice experience, using influencers during a developing crisis is a tight ropewalk. First, influencers may not genuinely align with the brand's values, potentially damaging reputation further. Misalignment can result in a lack of authenticity and skepticism from the audience, especially those impacted, exacerbating the backlash. Influencers may not fully comprehend the issue at hand, making them and the brand come across as indulging in tokenism. Lastly, if this is a commercial engagement, then it has to be declared and that will cause more damage.

Transparency and authenticity is the golden key. The brand's stakeholder audiences should exactly know what they are dealing with. Any type of knee jerk reaction is uncalled for. Brands should always keep their community fully informed about the latest developments and never hesitate to even delivery not so positive news.

You should be proactive!! Don't wait for your influencers to come to you with questions or concerns. Reach out to them early and often to let them know how the crisis is affecting your brand and your plans for the influencer campaign.

Influencers will instinctively want to cut ties with your company/brand in the wake of a reputational crisis. Do your best to communicate with them, as you would any other internal stakeholder, be up-front, be honest, and be direct as to how this will impact your relationship moving forward. Communicate your intentions clearly "we still see value in our partnership because..." and do your best to weather the storm.

Don't be afraid to make changes to your influencer campaign if you see that something is not working. You should always be prepared to pivot your strategy as needed.

It is important to compare the performance of your influencer marketing campaign to other marketing campaigns you are running, as well as to the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns during non-crisis times. This will help you to understand how well your campaign is performing and to identify any areas for improvement.

Remember that your content should be relevant to the crisis and should help your audience to understand it and to cope with it. Avoid creating content that is promotional or insensitive.

This is the holy grail. Influencer engagement will only succeed if it is done keeping long-term brand engagement, community building in perspective. Creating shared value along with stakeholders around a common goal and purpose should be the objective. The influencer and the brand should have a natural alliance on issues, themes and action; only then will the brand will be able to earn respect and trust from its audiences. It has to be a dialogue and with the objective to understand and make a difference to the lives of the audiences as well. Influencer marketing is an excellent tool and should be used authentically in a credible manner.