What are the best practices for setting up alerts and notifications for potential crisis triggers?

One key practice in crisis management is defining precise keywords and sources for alerts. Through my experience, I've found it beneficial to prioritize keywords that align closely with potential risks specific to our industry and operational geography. Incorporating both broad and specific terms ensures comprehensive coverage. For sources, I focus on reputable news outlets, industry-specific publications, and social media for real-time updates. This dual approach helps us stay ahead, swiftly identifying and addressing potential crises before they escalate.

In Media Monitoring, it's crucial to be thorough during the setup process for any endeavor - even under a time crunch. Taking the necessary time to research the topic of interest and understanding its nuance will inform your keyword, source, and parameter selections - which directly influences your results and your success. Defining client needs and interests, reading example coverage, and consistently updating keyword lists in line with developing coverage updates across sources will help monitoring efforts remain effective through the life of the project.

Due to our experience in Semantrum, we usually recommend setting up different types of alerts for various purposes: 1. Reporting notifications: daily/weekly/monthly. You will receive an email with a report that helps you to evaluate your performance 2. Specific notifications: set up certain keywords or other markers that show you that you need to pay attention to this publication. One of the most frequent cases is when you know that a journalist is biased against your company, so you set his name as a keyword to be notified when they write an article about you. 3. Emerging notifications: to receive notifications when the system finds negative sentiment or unusual media activity around your brand.

Issues & crises are fluid and dynamic. Different topics, and different clients, will facilitate different responses based on the nature of the situation and client preferences. A great deal of value in crisis lies in the timeliness of information delivery. It's critical to align with the recipient's preferences on cadence to ensure they're informed without creating "alert fatigue" - spamming their inbox with an unnecessary amount of communications that they get frustrated with. It's equally important to ensure the communication is distributed through an accessible channel. It needs to facilitate expedient delivery and accessible viewing for both you and the client.

In issues & crises, setting thresholds and criteria with the client/recipients at the inception of the project is critical to establish realistic expectations for your monitoring efforts. Media is a vast landscape of endless information - establishing parameters and setting guardrails will help streamline the most important information that pushes through to recipients. It's critical to balance this to meet the needs of the client while being reasonable for the team responsible for monitoring. Information that's necessary to establish includes: -Location -Language -Media Type -Content Type -Outlets/Platforms -Demographics -Key Timing/Date Ranges

Establishing clearly defined RACI at the inception of a monitoring effort is a non-negotiable. Typically, issues & crisis responses require the efforts of a larger team who see to the successes of a deep well of stakeholders. Get candid with your team and set very defined expectations on their responsibilities. I've found that having an established Crisis Monitoring Template ready BEFORE a crisis occurs significantly expedites the process by which you can mobilize a team. Establishing this in a Sharepoint ensures that everyone is accessing the same information and is aligned on their roles. This is also a great place to define the process by which you monitor so that new team members can jump in seamlessly in a pinch.

Conversation moves fast online and in social media. It tends to move even faster in the world of issues & crisis. Constant maintenance, quality assurance, and updates are critical to ensure the ongoing value of the information being distributed. As new stories publish, your alerts may become outdated if you don't update them with new keywords and information pertaining to the developments. Similarly, news and discussion outside of your topic of interest may erroneously trigger alerts - spamming recipients with irrelevant information. Review and reflect on your deliverables. Check multiple sources for relevant coverage. Check in with recipients to ensure accurate delivery and value.