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PR crisis management is vital when an issue can no longer be contained. Your brand’s reputation will be damaged. Download your free copy of this special edition PR Crisis eBook, and protect your business.
"You know my interest in Digital PR crisis management by now. I’ve written extensively on it and it’s a chapter in my new book for the public sector, but here is a great guide from Talkwalker."
Joanne Sweeney-Burke | Entrepreneur & Author @publicsectorpro @dti_ie
20% of PwC’s 2021 Global Crisis Survey respondents said the COVID crisis had a positive impact on their organization. Why? They were prepared!
Consumers are online 24/7. It's critical that brands have a crisis plan, and the best crisis management tools and resources in place.
Ignoring a looming crisis is not an option. Any negative online conversation must be monitored and dealt with. As quickly as possible.
BEFORE THE CRISIS
DURING THE CRISIS
AFTER THE CRISIS
Large or small, your business must have a crisis management plan, a crisis team to manage PR issues, and crisis management tools and resources.
Because, let's be honest, it's not IF it happens, it's WHEN.
It could be a teeny-weeny blip on Facebook that can be resolved with a painless, quick fix. Or, it could be a code red hitting all your social media accounts simultaneously, that needs the full crash team. Both with the potential to damage your brand reputation. Both needing a prepared and practiced crisis management strategy.
When you see a potential social media crisis emerging, you have to work through your crisis management checklist. This should include...
The definition of crisis management - brand protection, reputation management, enterprise risk management - is having prepared crisis scenarios that'll guide an organization tackling a sudden and powerful negative situation.
Yes, an increasing number of brands do appreciate the importance of having a crisis management plan. But, according to a PR crisis survey conducted by PRNEWS and CS&A International, only 62% have one. With doubt as to how regularly practice scenarios are run and whether they’re updated.
This is not good news, folks.
Regardless of the type of crisis heading towards you, your reaction time has to be fast to minimize potential damage to your brand. Your crisis plan must include more than just a press conference. No way is that going to be enough in the digital world that we now live in.
A comprehensive crisis plan must include social media, internal communication, supply chains, vendors, and the press. Best practices include...
An effective response model includes a system for categorizing and prioritizing issues, and details the appropriate response for each type. Here's a sample response model...
No crisis guide would be complete without touching on the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the start of 2020, the world went into lockdown. We moved online for work, socialising, entertainment, and shopping. Over a year later, and the pandemic still dictates our lives.
Crisis communication became essential for every business - to share advice, support, and comfort - and, for their own survival.
Locked down, social media became a powder keg of frustrated consumers stuck at home. Savvy brands used social media listening to monitor the online conversations and mood. Able to find situations that were likely to escalate and respond quickly and dodge a crisis.
As I've already stated, crisis communication should be a part of any business strategy. The pandemic has thrust it to the front of the comms queue because...
When our lives went into lockdown, we looked for reassurance. Ways to cope. Crisis communication experts can help us deal with the confusion surrounding us by sharing information and news updates.
Unemployment around the world was one devastating effect of the pandemic, with it estimated to exceed 200M in 2022.
Social media became a virtual soapbox on which we shared our concerns, and looked for help. Strong PR communication from brands can allay our fears and provide valuable support.
We're tired of being locked down, restricted in our work and social life.
Crisis communication teams should monitor and manage conversations that are heating up. Listen to our demands and meet our needs.
Inevitably, consumer behavior shifted over the last couple of years. A user-friendly buying experience became a must. Food deliveries were needed quickly. Personalization was expected.
Brands that didn't come up to the mark suffered customer complaints and bad reviews, which could potentially damage their reputation.
Online reputation management from the crisis response team was crucial, to control negative conversations and turn sentiment around.
When you see signs of a major crisis heading your way, it has to be all hands on deck. Your crisis management strategy should have a list of team members that you'll need to communicate with before, during, and after the crisis. Include all their contact details: email, phone number, mobile, WhatsApp group - during the working day, and out of hours.
Yep, not all crises happen between 9 and 5.
Depending on the crisis, it's likely that you'll be reaching out to several teams - HR, PR, legal, support, account managers, marketing. Make sure your team knows who the decision maker is. This person will be accountable for managing the team, the crisis, and working with the CEO for resolution.
Crisis scenario #1
Sam had a great weekend. Drank a few cocktails, went dancing with the gang, and took some selfies. How do I know? Photos on Instagram. Unfortunately, they were posted on the company account by mistake.
Big, big oops!!!
In 2017, Francoise Nyssen - the French Culture Minister - had her Twitter account hacked by the son of her community manager. The 13-year old tweeted insulting and inappropriate messages that when found, caused many red faces. They were swiftly deleted.
J'imagine la tête des premiers du @MinistereCC qui vont s'apercevoir des dégâts causés cette nuit... pic.twitter.com/pWidHclW0X
— Thomas Jarrion (@thomas_jarrion) July 18, 2017
Crisis scenario #2
Harsh but true, Sam was fired. Forgetting to switch accounts, meant inappropriate content was posted on the company account. Unhappy at being unemployed, Sam angrily let everyone know about being sacked. Again, from the company account.
Intentionally - it happens - or not, we'll never know. The damage was done.
Sam’s currently looking for new opportunities.
Way back in 2013, entertainment retailer, HMV, laid off 190 members of staff. The company - other things on its mind, presumably - lost control of its Twitter account and during an angry revolt, seven tweets were posted.
Yes, it's an oldie, but it's a perfect crisis example...
Screenshot - no surprise, all the original tweets were deleted.
Limit access to carefully chosen community managers. Ones that can be trusted to avoid these kinds of situations.
Yes, having a code red team is crucial. Taking responsibility and being transparent, should be the norm. Apologizing like a human rather than a bot - c'mon, that's obvious.
But... none of this matters if you don't have the best crisis management tools for the job.
A crisis will have several defining characteristics. The crisis will have the potential to go viral and will often outweigh any form of common sense. It's likely to provoke customers, fans, employees, and stakeholders.
When a social media crisis hits, it does far more damage than a bruised brand reputation. It can have devastating, long-term, if not permanent, impact that'll make your teams, customers, and prospects second-guess your reputation and fiercely question your bottom line.
Which leads us to the big question. How to deal with a crisis?
Simple. A comprehensive crisis management plan and the best crisis management tools on the market.
Choose your social media crisis tools wisely, preferably ones that provide the following features - and more - under one roof...
Real-time notifications from Talkwalker Alerts, from blogs, forums, news sites, and Twitter.
Our image recognition technology identifies these posts so you as a brand can protect your trademark against misuse and abuse.
Last year, Mattel recognized six women who've been role models in the battle against COVID-19, by creating one-of-a-kind Barbie dolls of each.
We used image recognition to find all the online shares. Source: Market Pulse
Video marketing drives more engagement. Digital marketers say they get 66% more qualified leads per year, while 90% of consumers state that watching a video helps them choose a purchase.
Along with our image recogntion, our AI-enabled video analytics allows you to find up to 3x the number of brand mentions. Meaning you'll never leave your brand exposed to abuse.
Identified with visual analytics. Cute trademark infringement.
This AI tech finds opinions online and scores them positive, negative or neutral. Our sentiment analysis technology captures customer sentiment with 90% accuracy, understanding the meaning of full sentences, and able to accurately determine customer attitudes and contextual reactions in tweets, posts, and articles.
It even gets sarcasm and irony. You can also amplify messaging that’s receiving positive engagement, while responding appropriately to negative comments.
To celebrate diversity, the LEGO Group recently launched a new set - Everyone is Awesome. This new set, inspired by the rainbow flag adopted by the LGBTQ+ community, went viral with 41K engagements.
We’re super excited to reveal our new set - LEGO Everyone is Awesome! Because we celebrate every LEGO builder ❤️ #LEGO #EveryoneIsAwesome pic.twitter.com/J7KSz3zWik
— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) May 20, 2021
Quick Search sentiment analysis looking at conversations on social media - mostly positive comments with the rainbow and heart emojis leading conversations.
It was never a crisis, but sticking with the LEGO theme...
Market Pulse - LEGO's announcement quickly went viral with 41K global engagements in two days.
If you can find a crisis management tool that has monitoring, listening, and analyzing all in one place, your response time will be accelerated. Detecting and managing crises will be painless.
Take a look at the following crisis management tools. See what you think...
Your reputation is your most valuable asset. You have to protect it. No one else will. Conversations online have the potential to damage your brand reputation, irreparable. But, monitoring online conversations manually is difficult, inefficient, and inaccurate.
Our platform gives you a comprehensive brand protection and reputation framework so you never miss a mention - across social, online and print media, TV and radio. Mitigate reputational risk through an early warning system and predictive alerts. Talkwalker's consumer intelligence platform will help you to monitor potential issues with instant and predictive alerting, unique AI-enabled sentiment analysis, image and video analytics.
Talkwalker analytics monitors social media, forums, blogs, newspapers, TV, radio, and more.
Ever tried to stop a crisis from spreading? Two words... herding cats.
Taco Bell underestimated how powerful social media is when they fell foul to a foul-mouthed employee. The shocking video of the employee calling the police when a deaf man tried to order food, was quickly shared online. At the time of publication, the video had over 1.7M views.
Needless to say, there was a deluge of negative comments... 14K.
The video was posted by the mother of the victim.
The employee was fired and the remaining team has been retrained.
The video was posted in January 2019. I used Quick Search to check out the sentiment for the first ten days...
Quick Search - crisis management tool - sentiment analysis.
Ouch!!!
In an age where we're online 24/7, brands have to contend with fake news, cyberattacks, defamatory rumors, hackers... The potential for a crisis to strike, has increased. How can you predict and control a crisis situation? My two crisis management templates will help you control a crisis and diminish its power.
Get your Free Crisis Management Templates
"Quick Search provides such an easy and user-friendly opportunity to deep dive into your competitors' social sphere; letting you harness their strengths and weaknesses to improve and cultivate a winning marketing strategy. For a specific breakdown of the importance of this, you should definitely check out Talkwalker's latest article on the necessity and implications of competitor analysis for your business and brand."
Christina Garnett | Community + Advocacy @HubSpot
Our AI-enabled video analytics lets you capture your brand in action. you'll find up to 3x the number of brand mentions.
No lie. 3 TIMES!
Partnering with our image recognition technology, it has access to our 30,000+ database of logos, objects, and scenes. Why have I included it in my list of the best crisis management tools? Trademark infringement. Counterfeit goods.
Use video analytics to find all the videos that contain your logo, even when there's no mention in the content. When I say 'your logo', what I mean is a representation of your logo.
With video recognition, you'll find all the videos that include your logo, even the fake ones.
Avoid a brand crisis with Talkwalker's visual listening tool.
There are no holidays when it comes to preventing crises. To monitor effectively, Google Alerts ensures that you’re monitoring your brand online, without actually having to physically monitor your brand’s reputation 24/7.
Consumers are discussing your brand, whether you're listening or not.
As we’ve noted before, people are talking about you and your brand whether you’re listening or not. With Google Alerts, you'll be listening constantly. It's easy to set up and it's free. Use Google Alerts to schedule several different keyword searches for it to monitor. You can also set it up to send you notifications for mentions, scheduled as you choose.
I'd recommend you click the “as it happens” button to ensure that you’re getting notifications in real time, and catch any potential crisis situation before it blows up.
Google Analytics - catch a potential crisis situation before it blows up.
TweetDeck is a great crisis management tool for monitoring your brand and handling a social media crisis. It's simple. It's effective. You're not going to get bogged down with analytical or complicated processes that would distract you from your main goal - social mendia management and social media monitoring.
With TweetDeck, set up a dedicated column to track your brand mentions. You can also create a search term specifically for keywords about your brand that would display all your replies and tweets. This is awesome for seeing who you’ve responded to and how quickly you were able to respond to a social media crisis.
Monitor interactons, which show you when someone tweets, retweets, or favorites something you’ve done on your account. As well as when someone follows you or adds you to one of their lists.
TweetDeck - monitor your Twitter accounts, your competitors', your influencers', all on one dashboard.
Unfortunately, this tool doesn't exist anymore. When I find a suitable alternative, I'll update.
SumAll is dedicated to helping your social media accounts grow without a ton of effort on your part. The platform helps to grow your business, save your money, and find you a larger, applicable audience for your social media channels.
A free program - not many of them left - SumAll helps you to engage your customers 24/7, without you having to physically engage. Automatically share your content to your social media networks. No hassle. Also, get the lowdown on your data. That means you’re able to track your social media performance, your ads, and your sales data with ease.
Connect all of your social media platforms in one place, making social media listening and analysis a cinch. You’ll be able to monitor what people are saying about you, how often people are talking about you, the state of your brand reputation, and more.
You won’t need to log into multiple platforms to post or monitor, instead, you can sign into one dashboard and get all the information you need, making it a breeze to monitor and respond to multiple platforms at once.
SumAll - automatically share content to your social media accounts.
Buffer is a crisis management tool that allows you to track any negative feedback about your brand, so you can immediately jump in and deal with a potential crisis situation. Buffer allows you to fully manage all of your social media accounts on a single dashboard. You can...
Buffer - manage all your social media accounts from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite is one of the most comprehensive and reliable free tools out there for brands looking to develop a social media crisis management plan. Not only is it exceptional when it comes to monitoring bare bones social media chatter, it also has well-designed applications for tablets, phones, and desktops. Making it versatile and useful no matter what platform you’ve been using to manage your crisis plans.
The platform offers various plans that allow you to keep track of basic analytics to more advanced. However, the free version is enough for a simple crisis management plan. You'll have the ability to monitor your accounts from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Because it’s an in-cloud service, you’re able to log-in from anywhere and from whatever device you choose.
Hootsuite - monitor the online chatter surrounding your brand.
The tools I've already covered are great for social listening, and to enable a fast response to social media issues. But, you’ll need more than just monitoring tools to address issues. You’ll also need a quick, convenient, and reliable way to alert your social media and marketing teams of any issues that may occur.
Slack to the rescue!
Slack is a cloud-based set of tools for team collaboration that keep your team in touch at all times. It's a quick, convenient way to privately chat with your entire team, specific members, or certain groups dedicated to specific projects.
Slack is a tool that companies use to encourage collaboration and workflow, and it allows you to share the information you need, as well as get in touch with the right people as quickly as possible. The best part? Slack is a free tool that anyone can download and use.
Slack - keep your team in the loop at all times.
You’ll need direct contact with your staff, which you do with Slack. You must also maintain open lines of communication with your existing customers. MailChimp is the answer.
MailChimp is an awesome email marketing platform that allows you to design and target professional-looking email marketing campaigns. It’s available in both free and paid options, and can do wonders for your social media crisis management.
For example, if your brand is embroiled in a negative social media issue, you can reduce potential damage with an email marketing campaign that will allay your customers' fears.
With MailChimp, you’ll be able to design your own templates, copy-cat off pre-designed templates, and build an email marketing campaign that works best for you.
MailChimp - design and target professional-looking email.
Another great alternative for email needs is Mailjet. It's an email solution for fast-moving companies looking to stay in contact with their customers on a regular basis. It offers you tons of beautifully-designed, custom templates for your campaigns and provides a heap of tools for analyzing and segmenting the correct information to the correct customers.
Mailjet allows you the freedom to customize your templates, as well as monitor your transactional email in real time, highlighting what’s important.
Compare your campaigns, and design specific campaigns for specific customers. It’s an all-in-one email marketing campaign service that will keep you and your customers in touch simply and efficiently.
Mailjet - analyze and segment your email marketing campaigns.
You’re in a code red crisis situation!!! Good time to test the validity of your crisis plan?
Seriously, put it to the test before it’s needed.
It's a rare occasion when a crisis arises when you’re sat in front of Twitter with your support team leader sitting beside you.
Social media is your life, your job.
Constantly watching, it's probably you that sees the early warning signs of an impending crisis. A social listening tool is your best friend - the eyes in the back of your head, your second set of ears.
Use it in your trend analysis to monitor specific keywords, mentions, hashtags, trending topics, sentiment, and your competitors.
To protect your brand, create queries to monitor your company, brand, products, competitors, etc. Ensure you include common variations, spelling errors, slang. Take a look at the queries that Coca-Cola could include...
Download Your Crisis Management Templates
There are always telltale signs when a crisis is heading your way, and in our always on world, social media is where they tend to strike first. As a human, you’ll recognize many of the signs. But, you won’t see them all.
Setting up smart alerts in your social listening tool, will identify the warning signs that you'd otherwise miss. Going beyond the limitations of human ears and eyes, you'll be able to find...
January 3, 2018 - Tesla received the usual amount of negativity.
Relax, snooze time. WTF! A spike in negative sentiment.
Drilling down, the source of negativity becomes clear. It sprung from an article in Reuters, highlighting a delayed production target - the second delay - of the new Model 3 sedan.
With Tesla falling short of Wall Street expectations and letting down its investors, finding and addressing this negative mention, meant that Tesla dodged a larger crisis.
Example - “We ask that when contributing your views to our social media pages, you ensure that they do not abuse, threaten, discriminate, or offend others. Otherwise they will be deleted. Please protect your personal privacy and that of others by not publicly posting personal information.”
69% of customers check reviews before contacting a business, with 72% trusting those reviews. Keep this in mind, when you consider ignoring or hiding bad reviews. You'll be missing out on an easy way to engage with your audience.
Identifying what kind of crisis you're dealing with early on, will play heavily on the final outcome and your ability to solve it successfully.
Level four - outside force
Some problems come from outside the company. For instance, when third parties hacked into Equifax portals - a consumer credit reporting agency that collects data from 800M+ consumers and 88M businesses worldwide. Blamed on a failure to patch a software vulnerability, the data of over 145 million consumers was compromised. Data that included social security numbers, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY - YOUR 13-STEP CRISIS PLAN CHECKLIST
It’s all about how fast you respond with a clear, honest, transparent answer. And, the solution. Do this well and you can turn online complaints into a reputation boost, with positive publicity.
Listen. Identify. Review. Respond.
Greggs, a UK bakery chain, suffered as a result of an online prank. When searching for Greggs, the Google results page displayed a fake logo with an offensive slogan - “providing s*** to scum for over 70 years.” Gregg’s social media team was flooded with comments. Naturally, the team alerted Google to the issue.
Hey @GoogleUK, fix it and they're yours!!! #FixGreggs pic.twitter.com/d5Ub7qtrLG
— Greggs (@GreggsOfficial) August 19, 2014
Gregg’s social media team’s response demonstrated sheer brilliance.
With Google playing along.
In November 2017, team collaboration tool Slack, went down. Not a crisis caused by the social media team, but they were responsible for dealing with the fall-out. They kept it light, playful, and updated constantly.
We're sincerely sorry for the service disruption you're seeing at the moment. We're working on it with top priority: https://t.co/hlhV4ZiG7E
— Slack (@SlackHQ) October 31, 2017
In 2013, Lululemon Athletica - sports attire brand - suffered Pants-Gate. Black yoga pants had to be recalled because they were - unintentionally and unexpectedly - transparent.
Yikes!
The brand, while suffering a drop in stock prices, demonstrated a strong crisis management plan. The brand:
See-Through Pants Problem Behind Her, Lululemon CEO To Leave http://t.co/X7VoFBAl1K
— NPR (@NPR) June 11, 2013
The brand quickly responded to comments, and when the CEO quit, jokingly referred to the incident.
Let’s recap…
BEFORE THE CRISIS
DURING THE CRISIS
AFTER THE CRISIS
DONE
We all make mistakes.
If you have a well-planned crisis plan and crisis managemnt tools, you’ll be ready to tackle reputational risks to your brand. Quickly, honestly, and effectively. You’ll retain trust in your brand and prove that you care about your customers. Play it right, and you’ll turn that frown upside down :)
To help you, I've created a special edition PR Crisis Management eBook. It's packed with expert advice, tools, and templates. Download it now!