Social Media Marketing in the Age of a?Crisis

How to Walk your Talk with Shareable and ??-able reactions. 

Social media is the fastest and most cost-efficient medium a brand can make its voice heard. Marketing for social media, for dummies, is how a brand can turn actions into reactions.

To be honest there’s no “social media recipe like a Pro” in times like a crisis. You’ll find guidance in who you are (as a brand), and what you can do — by caring about the people and what’s happening in the world.

Be Authentic — is the safest way to succeed in social media, to attract your desired audience, valid both organically and paid media. This principle will never be outdated. No matter the field, size, or type of services or products that a brand wants to promote, authenticity, transparency, and creativity applied in solving problems is what makes humans pay attention.

It applies to personal branding as well, to all the influencers and brand ambassadors in the world.

1. Tell Real-Time Stories about People, Work, Culture

Develop and share stories that can improve and bring benefits to everyone’s lives.

Social Listening. Pay attention to your people, customers, and to others. See what they care about and talk about. Adjust your content in times of crisis accordingly, not daily, but even hourly to have the right context. Then, use social media to turn your actions or ideas into powerful and helpful stories.

Communicating the company’s values in relation to the new reality companies face, like working from home, is now part of everyone’s social media strategy. Don’t be afraid to showcase it in your authentic way, as it’s happening in your organization. How people work now is your best reaction. Keeping quiet is not an option.

Paid Social media. Stay away from #FakeNews. Make sure you’re sharing and communicating only the official sources of information. Avoid #FakeStories and verify every donation you’re intending to promote. Talking about news, there’s room to invest in ads. I recommend you pay attention to where you’re going to direct your paid social media budget. On the other hand, review your copywriting and design graphics carefully for the current local context.

Empathize. In crisis times peoples’ reactions are even more unpredictable. A single picture at the right moment with a powerful message or a thoughtful Live can drive more engagement compared to a perfectly directed video production. Develop and share real-time stories that can improve and bring benefits to everyone’s lives. Take a look at this LinkedIn Live powered by Salesforce, Leading Through Change: Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff talking about How to Connect with Your Fans from Home.

Analyze. Social media involves a lot of research, analyzing your audience, their behavior, and external factors. Try to interpret that information to predict what they might react to, in order to deliver the expected message, in the right format, at the right time. Analyze your data insights.

Content mix — create a marketing mix of different content types (Coronavirus/Crisis involvement, culture, lifestyle, clients, projects, short “Bite-Sized-Content” such as Meet our people, tips and tricks, How-to articles) and other formats (Live, photos, links to articles, webinars, videos, gifs, etc) and adjust the content to each channel, day of the week, and time of day when scheduling or direct posting.

Timing is an important piece — I strongly believe that social media has given us the opportunity to react swiftly to unpredictable situations. When it’s time to get involved, and the way in which you’re doing it as a brand — can attract your future (followers, clients, employees).

It’s also the time of alliances, not only CSR but partnerships between even competitors, for the benefit of everyone. For example, you can read about the GSK & Sanofi Team Up: Sanofi and GSK to join forces in unprecedented vaccine collaboration to fight COVID-19, and about Apple & Google Team Up to ‘Contact Trace’ the Coronavirus.

Keep an eye on trending hashtags (you can use tools like hashatit.com) and associate your social media content with those applicable and create your own relevant brand hashtags for a certain content type. It’s mind-blowing for me to see how professionals around the world are simultaneously (re)thinking the same ideas in many different ways. Just watching the #WashYourHand hashtag we can see so much helpful and inspiring content. Here’s how we’ve reimagined the new process to #DesignThinking. The same applies to #StayAtHome. Here’s our #StayAtHome video, and #StayHealthy.

2. Inspire your (potential) followers 

Sharing is caring — now more than ever.

I‘m happy to see so many examples of kindness and collaboration, people sharing their knowledge, and searching for innovative solutions.

User-generated content is an authentic way of expressing the reinvented “client-facing” of your brand to the world.

Embracing agility on social media, together with your people (re)actions will guide you in the communication process. Inspire your audience to get involved, to appreciate your brand for what it stands for. Inspire your audience with your way of dealing with this critical situation, it can inspire others how to: set-up their working from home environment, how to stay healthy, how to learn a new skill. Now, more than ever sharing is caring.

Work with brand ambassadors — Your people are your brand ambassadors, work with them, and promote their actions and ideas. 

When talking about culture, brand ambassadors, and what it means to work for a company, it pops out to my mind the words of my colleague, Kiki (Cristina Baba, Delivery Manager). She asked months ago what the first word to come to mind when describing our company, Cognizant Softvision, Kiki instantly replied: “It’s gonna be two: people & projects.” For some reason, this answer still sticks out to me in this current working from home, as previously she said that her favorite activity at work is “collecting sweets in the morning (from colleagues).” How different! Anyway, Kiki is such a creative person that I’m sure she invented another cool routine with her team, also known as a virtual pod. This is how we work in Virtual Pods and I must catch up with Kiki and come back with a fresh perspective to see how they’ve adjusted. Here's the funny part of a virtual pod.

Promote your partners’ involvement — if you’re in the position to communicate about your business partners, make them shine in your own channels. Here’s how two of our partners, Mozilla and Estée Lauder, are responding to Covid-19.

All other tactics and strategies that normally apply in social media are related to the specific of each company, audience, and local context.

3. There are unlimited ways to help…

Get Involved — many brands are offering their help for the benefits of everyone. Ones are helping local affected communities, others are thinking big, creating and offering support in finding and developing solutions in this pandemic. We decided to help the local community where we’ve started more than 20 years ago. Our colleague, James Hartling, Chief Architect, is using technology to help deliver much needed supplies to the medical community in the US. Interested in making the Open Source Face Shield design for the medical professionals in your community? Visit https://open-face-website.now.sh/

Be Kind. Offer Your Help, Now! — the sales proposition that can create momentum by contributing to stopping the Coronavirus from spreading, supporting the medical, social, or economic systems to help those in need. Do it your way, be helpful. I believe this is how you’ll remain or become a favorite brand in people’s minds and hearts even after this pandemic. I hope these ideas will help you with your social media marketing strategy.

I wish you to walk your social media talk with shareable and love-able reactions. ??

Meanwhile, Facebook has just launched the “care” emoji reaction and Messenger Rooms — a free group-video feature.

Take care of yourself and each other.