How Social Media Can Help You Control a Crisis and Maintain Trust

How Social Media Can Help You Control a Crisis and Maintain Trust

January 19, 2012

Getting your message off the groundusing social media

361,000 views

Use all your tools

The goals of crisis management:

1. Terminate the crisis quickly2. Limit the damage3. Restore trust in your organization

to pre-crisis levels

Quick Review:

#1 RuleDon’t be caught without a plan in place.

Top Priority Develop a clear, informative position.

Quick Review:

Social media reaches all stakeholders Clients Employees Public officials Corporate Partners Donors Funding sources NUL News media Neighbors

Online amplification

•Bad news spreads fast on Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

•Monitoring consumer generated media is a must.

•Reactions must be fast.

•Have a streamlined approach and a team in place.

•Get ready for 2-way dialogue.

•One-way messaging doesn’t work anymore in a world of conversations.

•Build goodwill and your brand advocates will support you online if crisis hits.

•Communicating solely through press releases and scripted interactions doesn’t satisfy online communities.

•A system for listening is critical to remaining responsive.

Case Study: Domino's Pizza

Employees posted YouTube video of themselves atwork in Conover, N.C: sneezing on a sandwich,putting the cheese in their noses and doing other unseemly things to the food before delivering it.

• In first 48 hours, one million+ people viewed the video of product tampering.

• References to the video were in five of the top 12 search results on Google for “Dominos.”

What Dominos did well

• Responded swiftly, appropriately, on the media where the crisis was happening.

• President of Dominos USA was the spokesperson.

• Instead of being frustrated that the initial video was viewed millions of times, he thanks the social media community for bringing it to his attention.

• He thanks viewers of the video for “sticking with us” and addresses how Dominos is working to correct the situation.

Dark Sites

A preparation tactic for providing timely, accurate information for your stakeholders

when a crisis erupts.

What is a dark site?

A pre-developed, non-public Web site that can be published to the live Web

in the event of a crisis.

• Dark sites reside either on a discrete domain (URL) or temporarily replace the main organizational Web site on the corporate URL.

• Design should be clean and simple so as to not distract from the serious content.

Site map and functional requirements for a dark site

• Organization’s generic information

• List of leadership and board of directors

• News room/press releases/positive footage

• Pages for updates and new press releases

• Drafts of press releases/statements to adapt for specific crisis situations

• Press contact information

Crisis Communication Tools

Don’t wait for a crisis to hit to build engagement.

When a crisis arises,use all the assets in your online hub

to control the message and point people in the right direction:

your Web site, blog, social media platforms, email lists.

Media Outreach

Leverage Twitter to connect with media in real-time.

The Role of Search Engines

•Reputations are built or broken in search.

•80% of Internet users start their session at search.

•Organic search is sensitive to social media content due to the cross-linking.

•Difficult to dislodge and bury content once it is in search results.

Generate Fresh Content

When on a shoestring budget, use free press release services

such as pr.com or 1888 PressRelease.com

to post new content.

Various Tactics

•Consider using different types of multimedia to influence search surrounding a crisis.

•Search engines index everything from tweets to video.

•Social media content tends to rank high.

Consider a Google AdWords campaign when a crisis arises:

- great tool for search engine reputation management

- can be started in as little as 24 hours to generate results

BP spent $10,000+ per day on itsGoogle AdWords campaign.

When it’s over: - Stay in touch with all your audiences. - Continue monitoring media coverage. - Make sure you’re doing all you can and should do.

If you handle it well, this too shall pass.