How to Handle A Social Media Crisis & Manage a Brand Through A Social Media Crisis

This is a part of the concluding chapters in a book I’m writing on Social Media Management. A social?media crisis is anything that could negatively impact your brand’s reputation and reception through social media. It has been proven that it is not a matter of if something goes wrong with your brand, but when. Even a good crisis management plan/strategy can’t prevent unplanned blunders. As good as the internet is, it has an ill side of not forgetting things. Just as social media grows through the ripple effect, so also, crisis. And as it is often said, bad news spreads faster. Imagine you just clicked the button “publish”, and the first person that sees the post in the feed saw it from the negative light, spoke negatively about it, and also shared it on his/her timeline. And within 30 seconds, 5000 people around the globe have seen the reaction without necessarily checking the post and interpreting the initial content for themselves. How do you manage that? Just deleting might not be the wisest thing to do, as it is an indication you are trying to hide something from the public, which could flare the crisis and people will keep talking about it. There are other times when it is a post in which your brand is mentioned that would be the potential danger.

It is on record that a number of brands never regained themselves from such a crisis. To effectively address this, we need to understand the types of social media crises we have:

Multi-Channel Crisis: This is extremely dangerous because it attracts the most publicity due to the number of channels where it is seen. This poses a great danger because it has the potential to go viral within the shortest time period, and generate a great deal of negative publicity quickly.

Emerging crisis: This form of social media crisis does not spread as fast and far as a multi-channel crisis, as it is only on a single channel. However, the potential to escalate and become a real problem cannot be ruled out, if not tackled early. The most common form of this crisis arises from customer complaints that are quickly attended to, which then begin to spread on social media. The End-Sars crisis could be under this category. It also has the potential to become a multi-channel crisis.

Industry-Adjacent: This is an industry crisis, as it stems from the association. When a competitor of a brand gets into a social media crisis, and followers of the brand, who also follow you, begin to drag your name into the same mess by either mentioning your name or generalizing. For instance, a noodle brand has a crisis, and followers began to mention a popular brand that had no knowledge of the case at hand.

Industry-Adjacent: This is an industry crisis, as it stems from the association. When a competitor of a brand gets into a social media crisis, and followers of the brand, who also follow you, begin to drag your name into the same mess by either mentioning your name or generalizing. For instance, a noodle brand has a crisis, and followers began to mention a popular brand that had no knowledge of the case at hand.

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