How can you use social media to prevent a crisis?

A crisis usually gives early signs, which can be identified through monitoring. Sudden changes in behavior, such as an unusual increase in brand mentions, or negative brand mentions, are signs that must be associated with the alerts set up in the monitoring tool. This gives the team the ability to assess the scenario and react quickly, before the crisis escalates.

Using social media to prevent a crisis involves proactive monitoring and engagement. Set up alerts for brand mentions to detect potential issues early. Establish a positive online presence by regularly sharing valuable content and engaging with your audience to build goodwill. Respond promptly and transparently to any concerns or criticisms, demonstrating accountability. Educate your followers by sharing information on how you’re addressing risks or challenges within your industry. Use social media analytics to understand sentiment and trends that could signal emerging issues. This proactive approach can help you manage perceptions and prevent crises from escalating.

One of the worst things that can happen in a crisis is misaligned responses from employees and company leaders to criticism on social media. Despite good intentions, these comments can create noise in communication and fuel critics. Social media policy defines who responds on social media in the face of a crisis, and how they respond. It also defines how far employees and leaders can go in defending the brand and the organization, in line with their risk appetite and tolerance

I agree, this is a crucial step! Innovation is very important here as well. This team can include members from all relevant workstreams and they can work as a task force. Community management best practices and algorithms/trends will always evolve so crisis team members shouldn’t solely rely on social media managers to be subject matter experts. Collaboration will be key to maintain a unified message for targeted stakeholders.

Plan to stop misinformation and false news. Anticipate and prepare. Social media platforms allow you to communicate your own message which means you have an opportunity to define your story and the quality of your content – a la Taylor Swift. ?? Your private social media channels give you the prized ability to authentically and immediately share, address, engage or reject situations. #CorporateCommunications

Scenario plan for every potential outcome by developing a crisis comms playbook. This should be broken down into sections that map out key contacts and responses for issues around executive departures, product failures, employee issues, and more. Then annual simulations with Legal, Policy, Product, Marketing, and Comms should take place, so everyone knows what to do in real time.

Regularly testing your plan and how the team actually respond is so important. Just as in business continuity planning, unless you test a plan, you have no idea how good it is, what works well, your strengths, weaknesses, gaps, who excels, who doesn't or what you need to improve. Practise makes perfect, or at least so much better.

Keeping a pulse on your brand’s sentiment on social can play a key role in preventing crises. Responding sooner than later allows you to minimize uncontrolled narratives and speculation.

Always do recaps and post mortems to analyze what worked, what didn’t work, and future improvements. That will ensure you’re keeping processes fresh and not reinventing the wheel.

In addition to learning from your own mistakes, it is equally advantageous to learn from the mistakes of others. When a crisis unfolds and subpar social media becomes part of the narrative in the news cycle, please make sure your social media team knows how other companies have botched their communications.

Find ways to demonstrate to leadership how the good work you did to prevent stories from publishing or the ones you shaped to be better. This can involved monthly recap emails that detail this work or quarterly presentations. It’s important to proactively show this value — or they won’t know.