Social Media and Crisis Management

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

take take take take enjoyment. Welcome to Social Business unplugged helping you understand in plain English how to best leverage social media for your business. And now, here's the founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Hello, everybody. This is Neal Schaffer from women networking. Welcome to another episode of social business unplugged. Today, I want to talk about the topic of social media and crisis communications or crisis management. Now, a big disclaimer I am in no way is a public relations or corporate communications specialist experts or don't even have that much experience in the art. So why am I qualified to talk on this subject? Well, I'm not. But I wanted to offer some advice because the topic whenever I talk to a crowd, in addition to marketing, has corporate communication, PR professionals in the audience. When I talk about social media, the question always comes up, right? I think that social media crises are the reason that a lot of companies actually started engaging in social media in the first place. There were a number of famous crisis, United Breaks Guitars, thinking back to the Motrin moms, we've had a number of these crisis, I think the Applebee's firing of a waitress recently is another example. And I just wanted to share my perspective on this with you because I have worked with clients and creating a social media strategy. What do you do if you face a crisis? And I think that there's a few things to consider when talking about social media crises. And it's interesting, if you go back and do some research on the past crises that have happened in social media, were they really crises? In other words, did it really affect that brand? going back and looking at Motrin moms, there's talk now that maybe Motrin should have waited a little bit longer, instead of addressing the voices and essence of not that many people. In other words, was it a real crisis or not? Did it affect the majority of its customers? Applebee's should they have even posted on Facebook is that the most appropriate forum for them to deal with customer complaints or issues, and of course, the Applebee's issue, it goes much further than just posting on Facebook. It's what happened after they started posting. But needless to say, there's issues that come up. On the other hand, we've seen companies like Southwest Airlines, when they kicked off a famous movie director for him filling up too much of his seat, they responded very, very quickly. And I think for every crisis that becomes public, there are a number of crises that have been diffused, because companies have handled them in a very, very efficient and swift way. The point I wanted to make about all this is when I was contacted by one of my clients, who was really looking for someone that could help them on crisis management, you know, I told them that the best way to prevent crises which you're never going to be able to prevent every single crisis that happens, because you cannot control the uncontrollable, you cannot predict the future. But it's about proactively engaging and building up a social media following it's building up trust with the public through social media engagement on those channels, where the public is, but most importantly, where your audiences where your customers, your partners, your vendors, and your employees are and proactively building goodwill fostering goodwill, because if you have that goodwill, and if you foster the creation of brand advocates, what's going to happen is if there's a crisis, there's going to be a lot of people that are going to stand up for you and it will help I don't know about completely diffused this quote unquote, crisis, but it will definitely help a lot of people on social media come to your site without you even having to say anything. And once again, if you do some research, you'll be able to find that there was a crisis about Boingo, that Boingo, which provides Wi Fi or wireless internet services all the sudden one day their community manager notice that they got some mentions on Twitter saying stop spamming me. And the community manager realized that that was out of the ordinary and immediately what did she do immediately, she contacted their director of corporate communications. So if you're actively engaged in and actively monitoring and you're on the frontline, and you see something weird going on, it's a potential emergency situation, you have to be in contact with an emergency team. And another way that you deal with crisis from a tactical perspective is you have an emergency team in place when something goes wrong, you can be in contact within a few minutes, if not within an hour of finding the issue of being in direct contact with senior management because as we all know, social media, what you do in it is going to affect the way that the entire public sees your brand. So the interesting story about this is that they dealt with the issue very, very quickly. So quick response. We all know how important that is. When social media the CEO came out and blogged under his name on their corporate blog, letting people know about the situation so this trend It's apparently about letting people know even if you don't know what the issue is that you're looking into the issue and you realize there is an issue will often help diffuse things. The interesting thing is once they realized what the issue was, it was, I think six or seven hours, when they got that first mention of stop spamming me. And they realized there was an issue with their systems. What ended up happening was on this final blog post by the CEO, and I think he blogged two or three times, within those seven hours, the CEO said, please feel free to comment. And I think they got, you know, 70 Something comments, and most of them were from their fans, or their brand advocates, or their social media followers, you know, who thank them for letting them know, and what have you. So I'm a believer that there's always going to be negative people out there. But I also believe that people just want to know that their issues are being heard. And that's why consumers feel empowered with the advent of social media, listening and responding. But more importantly, preventing a potential crisis by really building that goodwill with your social media fan base is going to be the best weapon that you have, should something go wrong, then you get into Do you have a test team setup? are you monitoring actively? Can you respond quickly? And can your CEO actually personally respond, I think is really the ultimate, whether it's done via blog via video or what have you. So these are just some thoughts. I know a lot of you listening out there are from different disciplines, and obviously social business unplugged. It's not just about marketing. It's how social media affects the entire business. And it's one reason why another topic another tangent on this topic, are people saying, well, because of social media, we don't need PR anymore. We just need marketing. But in fact, every department in your company is even more important with the advent of social media. And every department in your company has to have a seat at the table because there are issues like these which will undoubtedly happen that rely on a group within your company that is in charge of your corporate reputation. That is not the mission of marketing. Marketing is in charge of, at the end of the day, increasing sales, brand awareness, what have you. That is why there is a need for a dedicated person or if not this task force that has executives that can help your company should you have a crisis. That's it for today. We're keeping it eight minutes. Thank you very much for listening. Appreciate your ratings on iTunes and comments, and make it a great day. Bye. Bye, everybody. You've been listening to social business unplugged with Neal Schaffer, social media author, consultant, speaker and university professor. If you'd like any specific topics covered on future episodes, or if you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, please connect with me by email. Neal at windmill networking.com on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer and on Twitter at Neal Schaffer. Please also visit windmill networking.com for daily Social Media for Business updates. Thanks for listening and make it a great day.