Crisis Communications and Social Media

If you look at training seminars and webinars for crisis communication these days, social media is emerging as a “hot” topic but even then we might assume that the adoption of Social Media for crisis communication in European based companies is low or not existent.

When a crisis strikes (like we have in the financial markets now) , speed is of essence. Open communications channels, direct feedback and almost real-time situation updates are crucial in order to manage the communications side of a critical event. Social Media with their ease of use, speed and direct interaction can support good online crisis communications in ways never seen before.

Currently PR and communications are primarily focused on:

• Listening for mentions about client’s brand
• Using social media for outreach and campaign publicity
• Monitoring and mitigating in the event of a crisis

Tomorrow - PR and communication need to evolve and focus on:

• Real-time social media engagement to monitor and manage brands efficiently
• Influencer identification

A basic definition of social media is the use of technology to facilitate interaction and the sharing of information. Below are some tips on how to involve social media technologies for crisis communication:

Before “it happens” – the importance of planning and preparing

• Start with a SWOT and fill in the appropriate gaps (easily updated website, no ability to send mass messages, no concept of blogging, know you bloggers in your community,….)
• Give the clinical PR process a human touch and define copy guidelines. Be prepared to enter the conversation
• Create black sites – dormant resource website – and structure it like a crisis blog (via WordPress).
• Create a brand monitoring plan with required tools and keywords to monitor (via Trucast, Google news Alerts, Google Trends, Technorati, BlogPulse, …)
• Mix your brand monitoring with Site behavior metrics based on a measurement platform like Webtrends, Omniture, Google Analytics, Indextools, … or measure Brand Enagement with Nuconomy
• Define Crisis comm metrics to monitor your brand and included the in your Overal KPI Dashboard

But remember:

• Efficiently putting social media into practice is hard work and demands a long term strategy.
• Don’t put all your eggs into one basket: not everyone can be found online, and not everyone online uses social media

During a crisis – focus on reactivity and feedback

• Multiple ways of syndicating your message online, in real time transparently and work  independently of an IT-department for content updates. But try to respond quickly and effectively and over multiple channels online and offline.
• If needed include micro-blogging tools like Twitter / Yammer to send short to-the-point updates to the media, staff or stakeholders and for those on the road use mobile SMS.
• Perform brand monitoring and social media participating by using technologies like TruCast of Visible Technologies (part of the WPP Group) to listen and learn what consumers are saying and participate in discussions by placing the right message in front of the right audience.
• Perform monitoring and measurement for the full range of “keywords” linked to your brand, company name, product or service names but also your executive team.

After the crisis – make sure the “fire is out” and optimize your plan

Apply continues brand monitoring and measurement of the discussion by applying social media or community metrics like:

• frequency of return visits; frequency of comments by visitors
• comment-to-post/ratio
• raw word increase/decrease
• ratio positive/negative comments (rating or voting) and trending
• correlation between social media activity and site behaviour (look-ups for press release etc)

But also Analyse and learn how to optimize your crisis communication plan

If possible identify and segment your target audience into Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives and define a future targeting and engagement strategy for all of them.

Note: These Days has strategic partnerships with several vendors mentioned including Nuconomy. So don’t hesitate to contact us if social media monitoring and online engagement management is important for you.