Prevent Crises with Social Listening

Written by Rebeka Eagar for Nuvi.com

The worst part about a crisis is feeling that you have no control. Many crises pop up before you get a heads up, forcing you to react rather than have the opportunity to actively quell an issue before it grows into a crisis. As a result, your reactionary PR statement, if you make one, feels like your shooting in the dark because you often don’t know the whole story or exactly how your audience is reacting to the situation while balancing brand reputation with social politics and company policy. Convoluted and nerve-racking barely describe the experience.

PR crises can quickly become an avalanche of adverse effects: your brand reputation comes into question, advocates question their loyalty, potential customers go elsewhere, and the list goes on.

What If You could see a Crisis Coming?

Social listening allows you to see what your audience is saying across social media about your brand or industry. Many social listening tools gather analytics based on metrics such as time spent on a web page, comments, text analytics that determine emotion (or sentiment) toward a brand, shares, and more. 

Our goal is to make the volumes of social data you gather comprehensible so you can use your insights to take concrete steps forward whether it be for social campaigns, crisis management, or customer success. 

The comprehensive nature of Nuvi’s software allows companies to identify potential problems or points of collapse and take control of the situation before it snowballs.

How can I see a Crisis Coming?

Monitoring a Potential Crisis with IBM

On November 29th, the company experienced the largest negative sentiment spike it had seen in several months. To analyze the source of the sentiment, we dove deeper to determine if it was a potential crisis. We discovered the origin of the negative sentiment was a tweet published by Robert Reich that listed several companies that had avoided federal income taxes for 2019. Once we found his tweet, we could see it created a moderate spread of negative sentiment (over 23 thousand shares and a thousand comments) that warranted an even deeper dive to determine crisis potential.

Image of Nuvi’s bubble sentiment chart. Green represents positive, red negative, and blue neutral. The white lines indicate the spread of a post, tweet, or blog article.

The spread chart above makes it easy to determine the point of origin so you can quickly find the original post or tweet and dig into the discussion. Carefully analyzing the discussion on the original post allows companies to determine the potential danger of the slide and ways to control it. Luckily for IBM, the primarily negative comments were directed at the general list or the idea of companies getting out of paying taxes rather than one company specifically, so this example had a lower chance of developing into a crisis. 

Believe it or not, an avalanche and a crisis can be controlled in the same way. The trick is to be the one holding the explosive.

When managing potential avalanche threats, professionals use tools to measure snow depths high on the mountain tops. These metrics allow them to identify potential threat areas which allow them to take action before an actual avalanche happens naturally. In a controlled environment, these experts purposefully plant explosives to cause a man-made avalanche. Of course, roads are closed before hand to mitigate any risk of harming people.

It’s important to note that an avalanche still happened but within a far more controlled environment. Uncontrollable adverse affects were averted because professionals had the right tools to monitor risk. Likewise, Nuvi’s software allows you to monitor potential crises. This gives you a hand up on managing your reputation in an increasingly complex social ecosystem.

Nuvi’s monitors update in real-time so you will never be behind on insights. You will be able to catch most potential problems before they develop with these instant updates. In an effort to ensure nothing is missed, you can set up alerts that notify you whenever your company’s negative sentiment gets to a certain percentage you determine.

But What If a Crisis Suddenly Explodes? How Does Social Listening Help Then?

Social listening helps companies get a broader view of their audience across social media. During crises, there might be more side discussions that you can’t see because they don’t use a hashtag or tag your company. With social listening, you can set up monitors to search for keywords within the issue so your likelihood of missing key conversations your audience may be having is much slimmer.

Manage Your Crisis- Christopher Ranch

In February, Christopher Ranch discovered they had a PR crisis after a docuseries falsely portrayed their farming practices as unethical. To repair the damage done by the docuseries, Christopher Ranch entered the social media sphere and enabled Nuvi’s suite of tools to listen to their audience and engaged in conversations that perpetuated the false claims in order to express the truth and build up their brand positively in their customer’s minds again. As they got to know their audience on a more personal level, they began to connect with them and regain their customers’ trust.

Christopher Ranch Utilizes Nuvi to come out on Top of a Crisis

Turn those opposed to your company into strong advocates by staying on top of social discussions with the aid of influencers- who you can easily find through our software.

All the solutions we offer to both quell a potential crisis and to react strategically are based on knowing your audience, communicating with them directly, and knowing their thoughts and concerns. Identify potential avalanches and how to contain them. Then, respond in a way that will regain their trust while maintaining and furthering your brand reputation.

Stay on top of crises with constant insights! When they arise, portray your company’s side of the story and don’t let opposing views and gossip speak for you again. Request a demo to learn more.