Managing a Social Media Crisis

A social media crisis can happen to any company, at any time, for any reason.  In the utility industry specifically, a prolonged power outage will undoubtedly lead to negative social press.  The good news is that you can minimize the damage to your brand by having a mitigation plan in place. 

How to Plan for a Social Media Crisis

According to this article, in general, the plan should involve the following:

• Guidelines for identifying a social media crisis
• Roles and responsibilities
• Internal communication policies
• Critical employee contact lists
• Pre-prepared and approved canned communications
• Summary of the company’s overall social media policy

As you can see, the first step to having a good plan is to have a process in place that will allow your team to become aware of an emerging social media crisis.  This involves three steps:

1. Create a listening program by purchasing a tool to monitor social media conversations, or setting up Google Alerts. 
2. Put criteria in place that allows you to differentiate between a crisis and a ‘non-crisis.’  This means looking for conversations that are outside of normal conversations, and looking for conversations that could have a company-wide negative impact.
3. Create a flowchart that documents specific courses of actions for specific types of crises. 

These three factors will dictate when and how the plan should be triggered or activated.  Once action is required, the meat of the plan revolves around communication – dissenters expect to hear from the company and failure to respond could accelerate the damage to your brand.  And this communication must happen very quickly, because according to Hootsuite, over 25% of social media crises spread internationally in less than one hour.  If you wait to react until the next day, it’s essentially too late.

Other best practices include pausing all scheduled social media postings until the crisis has subsided, avoiding arguing with dissenters, using a combination of short social media response messages plus more in-depth communications such as press releases, and regrouping after the social media crisis has passed to identify any lessons learned and/or important updates to the plan.  Good luck!