From Crisis to Connection

Nobody wants to see their house on fire, but sometimes fire outbreaks do happen - when it happens, people do everything possible to ensure the fire does not spread but is snuffed out immediately. Likewise, a social media crisis is not something anyone wants for their business, but it happens.

A crisis represents any social media incident that particularly hurt your brand's reputation or ability to do business. A crisis can range from tons of negative comments by a large group of customers complaining about the same thing to an outright boycott of your products or services.

No brand is immune to a social media crisis, but the way a brand responds to and manages a crisis determines if the crisis will hurt its reputation or value. Brands that respond well to crisis see a 20% increase in value on average, whereas those that respond poorly see a 30% decrease.

You should be prepared or at least know how to handle social media crisis when it happens, because no matter how good or popular your brand is, complaints and negative backlash from aggrieved customers are inevitable.

Remember the 2018 H&M "coolest monkey in the jungle" incident? The picture didn't sit well with people, customers were deeply offended and this resulted in H&M having to take down the post and publicly apologizing. During that period, the fashion retailer received a lot of bashing on social media, and celebrities like The Weekend reacted by stating they would refuse to work with the brand in the future.

This is not a good place for any brand to be, and if it gets worse, customers can boycott your products for that of competitors. If a crisis is not handled the right way, prospects who have no experience with your brand can be turned off and existing customers can question if they should continue doing business with you.

Whether you are prepared or not, a crisis can hit at any time, but to ensure your efforts are focused on quenching the fire rather than fueling it, here are a couple of things to consider.

Identify the source of the problem 

Before you go about putting out fires, the first step is to identify what triggered the crisis. What caused the uproar? Was it caused by an inappropriate or insensitive message on your social media page? Maybe it was caused by a distasteful comment from an employee or a product failure being experienced by several customers.

Sometimes the source of the problem can even be an offline incident that was brought on social media - identifying the origin of the crisis is the first step towards handling it.

Finding out what caused the crisis will guide you in drafting the right response. Any response coming from your brand has to align with what's going on. To avoid giving an out of context response, carefully backtrace to identify the root of the problem 

Identifying the root of the problem will also inform your distribution strategy. For instance, if the uproar started from Twitter before spreading to other channels, it means the first audience to address are those on Twitter before proceeding to other channels.

Identifying the source of the problem also means identifying those initial social media accounts that raised the issue and spotting any trends or hashtags they might have created. 

Set up a dedicated team

This team will not just be responsible for managing the crisis, they'll also be responsible for alerting everyone within the organization about the situation so that employees don't get caught off guard by outsiders.

The team will oversee the creation of content during the crisis. They'll also be responsible for providing employees with content they can share just in case clients, customers, and media personnel asks about the crisis. This will ensure that all communications relating to the crisis are coming from the same source and are consistent across touchpoints.

Your crisis team should be a good mix of executive personnel (to enforce decisions), management (to coordinate), marketing (to create, design and distribute the right message), and legal (to ensure regulatory compliance).

Adapt content to reflect the crisis

It would only be salt to injury if the content that customers get from your brand during a crisis is completely out of tune with the current situation. That means you have to pause your usual branded content and pivot towards content that shows you are aware of the situation.

You can’t afford to accidentally post "#TGIF - Have a beautiful weekend or any post that sells your products" when your brand is being dragged online for an ill - like, that will just infuriate people much more and will portray your brand as being insensitive and unaware.

If your brand is going through a shitstorm, note that any content that comes out of your organization will be seen as your response to the situation. To avoid being misunderstood, adapt your current content plan or change creative direction completely until the storm subsides. 

Every post during a crisis should be appropriate for the situation, and it’s important to vet these posts to ensure they align with your crisis communication strategy.

Hug your haters

There's no need fueling your own crisis since you're already in it, use every opportunity to show empathy and share in the pain of your audience. The goal is to salvage the situation and connect with your customers as much as possible to strengthen loyalty.

Social media crisis management is not about your brand winning the conversation, it's about showing your customers that you value their opinions even if it's at your detriment - your brand must never get in a tit for tat situation with customers.

Complaints indicate pain points that your business needs to address, and if a whole lot of people are lashing out about the same thing at the same time, it means you have to take that thing seriously. Customers can choose not to say anything and just boycott your brand, but when they do, welcome it and see it as a chance to give them an awesome experience and probably convert them to advocates.

The best way to deal with severe agitators is to respond twice in the open and then move the conversation to the DM or a call or email - empathy is key either way.

Review and learn from mistakes

Once your team has been able to get things under control, the next step is to review the crisis from start to finish. Highlight areas needing improvement, and examine what triggered the crisis and how it can be avoided next time.

Get feedback from those who were directly responsible for handling your social channels and responding to customers. Their feedback can be used to create a better strategy for handling future issues.

The most important aspect of reviewing your crisis is documenting every inch of the situation:

I'll advise you to make copies of all posts, tweets, status updates, blog posts & comments, and emails.

Analyze website traffic and search volume patterns during the crisis period.

Highlight where, when and how the crisis broke out.

Highlight your internal notification and response protocol.

Highlight specific customers who rose to your defence and thank them.

These are not actually all you need to consider during a crisis, but it's a good place to start.