A public relations crisis is a brand’s worst nightmare. Viral negative comments cause a ripple effect of costly hurdles for businesses. These can range from product recalls and regulatory scrutiny to strained partner relationships and massive legal settlements.
But the most challenging issue to address is damaged customer trust. With a tarnished reputation, the brand struggles to regain its clients’ confidence, leading to declining sales and market share.
While a PR crisis can be a disaster for the company, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the end of your brand. One tool you can use to address negative publicity is social media.
In this article, we’ll delve deeper into social media crisis management and discuss these key points:
• What Is Social Media Crisis Communications?
• 3 Tips on How To Proactively Prepare for a Crisis
• 6 Tips on How To Professionally Respond to a Crisis
• Guiding Principles for Addressing Crises
• Tackle PR Crises Like a Pro With Thrive
What Is Social Media Crisis Communications?
Social media crisis communication is the use of social media channels to strategically respond to an incident or a series of events that threatens or damages a company’s reputation and operations. Some examples of these incidents are customer complaints, product recalls and scandals involving company executives and employees.
Crisis communication via social media aims to proactively address widespread negative attention from the press, customers or regulatory bodies.
Why social media?
• Most crises nowadays start and spread on such platforms, so companies must address the problem where they happen.
• Social media lets companies communicate quickly to a broad audience. Since most people are on these channels, they’re also more likely to see the information you post.
Social media crisis management offers the opportunity to show transparency and accountability by providing real-time updates and answering concerns and questions promptly. This effectively addresses rumors and speculations, ensuring you reach your social media goals of providing accurate information about the current crisis and reassuring audiences.
With social media, you can see conversations in real time. This allows you to spot and monitor emerging issues and craft messaging more intentionally. Ultimately, social channels help protect your brand equity and contribute to effective online reputation management as you demonstrate responsiveness and transparency in addressing issues and alleviating stakeholders’ concerns.
How To Proactively Prepare for a Crisis: 3 Tips
Social media crisis management has two components: proactive and reactive.
In the proactive approach, you anticipate the challenges ahead, create a framework for crisis communications, track brand sentiment and prepare response templates.
Here’s an in-depth discussion of these proactive crisis communications steps:
1. Develop a Crisis Communication Plan
A social media crisis management plan provides a framework for how the company communicates with internal and external stakeholders during a crisis or emergency. Your plan must have the following elements:
Risk Assessment
Determine the possible events or situations that can negatively affect your company’s image and operations. Risks can be:
• Operational: Stemming from power outages or supply chain disruptions.
• Reputational: Could be customers complaining about a product or service.
• Legal: Pertaining to regulatory violations leading to fines and sanctions.
• Human Resources: May be caused by workplace accidents and employee misconduct.
Evaluate the severity of risks to determine the key teams’ level of involvement in addressing crises later on. For example, a tone-deaf social media post or comment may be low-risk and might only involve the marketing and public relations teams working together to handle the situation. However, a scandal involving a top executive is high risk and should include the executive leadership in executing a social media crisis management plan.
Crisis Communications Team
The team must have representatives from key departments: marketing, public relations, customer service, legal and executive leadership. Each representative must know their roles and responsibilities when managing a crisis.
Escalation Framework
Define how issues will be escalated to specific authorities within the organization. It should have clear guidelines on which issues qualify for escalation, who must be notified and what steps the authorities should take. This could include conducting an all-hands meeting or drafting answers to media inquiries.
2. Monitor Brand Mentions on Social Media
Social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Agorapulse help you see what people on social media say about your company. Aside from brand mentions, you can track keywords related to your brand.
Analyzing online conversations about your brand is critical in detecting potential issues early on and keeping problems from potentially becoming bigger, costlier crises. As you take a proactive approach in crisis management, listen to feedback from stakeholders and answer concerns promptly before they escalate.
3. Build a Messaging Bank
Create templates for different types of risks and public relations crises. It’s ideal to have ready response templates for the company’s general mishaps, offensive or insensitive marketing messages, accusations and lawsuits. With a messaging bank providing a writing prompt, you’ll find it easier to develop a quick response to crises.
6 Tips on How To Professionally Respond to a Crisis
While the proactive approach focuses on anticipating negative incidents in the future, the reactive approach to a crisis involves addressing the issue at hand while using online reputation management software solutions to examine stakeholders’ sentiments in real time. Your goal when communicating is to reflect your brand values and put your company in a positive light.
As you implement your PR crisis communication plan, take these steps when responding to a flurry of negative sentiments from the public:
1. Acknowledge the Problem Quickly
A timely response to a crisis is critical. As soon as you learn about a brewing crisis, release a statement stating that you’re aware of the problem and are taking action to address it.
If you don’t have the full scope of the incident yet, publish a holding statement or a pre-prepared, brief response acknowledging the issue. While it prevents speculations and misinformation, it buys you time until your team fully understands the situation.
• Rely on your messaging bank when crafting a holding statement.
• Keep it brief, answering the basics:
○ What happened?
○ Where and when did the incident happen?
○ Who was affected? (apologize and express sympathy to those inconvenienced)
• Avoid mentioning unconfirmed or uncertain details, as this may contribute to further confusion.
• Be careful not to shift the blame to other people or entities, even if this is indeed the case. The public may perceive this as copping out of responsibility.
One of the popular social media crisis management examples that showed the importance of responding to crises in a timely manner is Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad in 2017. When the brand received massive backlash for the tone-deaf ad featuring the supermodel joining a protest and offering a soda to an officer, it quickly acknowledged the problem, removed the content and apologized to those offended.
Source: Pepsi’s Twitter Page
2. Create a Dedicated Crisis Facts Post
The public expects you to provide a more thorough explanation for what happened. So, learn as much as you can about the incident. Create a social media PR facts sheet outlining the following:
• Affected Parties: Specify who’s affected by the crisis and the extent of its impact.
Events Sequence: Provide a timeline of the events leading up to the crisis, including when the company knew about the incident.
• Action Steps: Discuss the specific action points you’ve taken to minimize the crisis’ impact, promote customer safety and address the root cause. Include actions taken to prevent the incident in the future.
• Contact Information: Provide the contact details of specific people to whom stakeholders can reach out if they have more questions.
Create a social media post that tackles all the information you gathered and pin it to your social media page. If necessary, boost this content to achieve your social media goals of broadening reach and informing the intended audience. Whenever a customer or partner asks about key details of the incident, answer them with a link to the post to provide comprehensive information.
Included in the list of unforgettable social media crisis management examples was Facebook’s response to the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal in 2018. To alleviate user concerns, the social media giant’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, shared an in-depth post detailing the timeline of events and the steps they took to protect user data.
Source: Meta
3. Be Consistent in Your Messaging Across All Platforms
In a crisis, accuracy is important to reduce further confusion and the spread of misinformation. Moreover, remember that your brand is at risk of losing credibility over a negative incident, so the last thing you need is for people to think you’re saying one thing on Facebook and another on X (previously Twitter). Always refer to your facts sheet to know the core of your messaging, provide accurate details on different social platforms and maintain your brand identity.
Popular personal care brand Dove was once the trending topic on social platforms for the wrong reasons. In 2017, it released an ad showing a woman of color taking off her shirt and turning into a Caucasian. The brand acknowledged the problem, posting an official statement with the same message on its Facebook and X platforms.
Source: Dove’s Facebook Page
Source: Dove’s Twitter Page
4. Offer Timely Updates
People will likely have more questions and opinions even after releasing a social media PR facts post. Respond to queries and comments promptly. You may also gather all the frequently asked questions and compile your answers in another post so the broader audience can see your responses.
If investigations are involved in the incident, provide updates on findings. However, be careful not to promise dates when the crisis will be resolved, as timelines can quickly change.
5. Pause All Scheduled Posts
Whether informative or promotional, scheduled posts must be placed on hold, as these may sound insensitive during a crisis. Since these pieces of content are planned in advance, with different social media marketing goals in mind, they may not align with the narrative and tone you’re using at this sensitive time. All your outbound marketing efforts should be focused on managing the crisis.
6. Analyze Stakeholders’ Sentiment
Track likes, shares and comments to get an overview of how the public feels about your crisis response. To see people’s opinions beyond your social posts, use social media listening tools. Aside from direct brand mentions, monitor hashtags and keywords related to the crisis.
Analyze the sentiment and determine if it’s improving or worsening. If it’s the latter, adjust your communication strategies. Usually, people will be upfront about what they feel is lacking in your response. Your choice of words may be confusing. Your tone may appear to be deflecting blame on someone else. Or, you may not be providing timely updates.
Guiding Principles for Addressing Crises
Navigating a social media crisis requires working on various tasks, from managing social media mentions and crafting clear, informative explanations to contacting key representatives within your company.
As you take on these tasks, remember these key principles in crisis communications:
• Responsiveness: Don’t ignore negative publicity, thinking it will go away on its own. It may die down eventually, but people will always remember that you didn’t do anything about it. A better approach is to address issues and questions promptly.
• Clarity and Transparency: When people are left in the dark, they become more suspicious and vulnerable to believing rumors and speculations. That said, share relevant information with your audience to reduce the negative impact of a crisis.
• Cohesion: Be consistent in your story across all social platforms. Otherwise, people will be confused or perceive you as untrustworthy.
• Empathy: Put yourself in the shoes of people affected by the crisis. Acknowledge their feelings and show genuine concern.
• Authenticity: Be sincere in addressing problems. While you may be following a template, customize the tone and language of your replies according to your brand voice. Steer clear from generic responses.
Tackle PR Crises Like a Pro With Thrive
While crises will forever be tied to your brand, you have the power to turn things around with a professional response to the negative publicity. If you do it right, you protect your reputation and earn back the trust of stakeholders. PR crisis communication is challenging, given the pressure to communicate quickly and accurately, the public scrutiny and outcry and the abundant rumors about your brand.
A professional digital marketing agency like Thrive can tackle these obstacles on your behalf. Our team offers online reputation repair solutions, helping you develop a robust crisis communications plan and see measurable results in achieving social media marketing goals. We specialize in crafting messages that alleviate your audience’s concerns and reflect your brand voice.
We also use sophisticated platforms to monitor brand mentions and analyze customer sentiments, enabling you to respond promptly to negative feedback. Contact us today to learn more about our solutions.
