April 29, 2011
How to Avoid a Social Media Disaster – Takeaways from PRSA/NIRI Luncheon April 20
Last week I attended How to avoid a social media disaster, a panel presentation luncheon co-hosted by the Public Relations Society of America and the National Investor Relations Institute. Below are my favorite takeaways from the smart panelists and moderator, Christopher Budd, Clay McDaniel, Rebecca Hoskins , and John Woodyard.
- One of the main differences between crisis communications in the social media era versus before is that now it’s much more likely that your senior team will be the last to know about a crisis.
- 80/20 rule: You can usually predict crises that are most likely to happen to your company based on its industry and operations. Work with lawyers in crisis preparation to come up with 80 percent of content ahead of time so that they only have to approve 20 percent during crises.
- A big key to social media success during a crisis is making sure your brand has an active and credible social media presence before the crisis. This was at the root of @BPGlobalPR.
- Third parties will take advantage of your crisis; it is in their interests to prolong it. If you don’t fill the information void around your crisis, they will.
- In order to measure crisis communication effectiveness, you need to measure what didn’t happen. This is opposite of most public relations measurement, which counts coverage and social media activity as success.
- In deciding who should be using social media on behalf of a brand, think about who shouldn’t be using it. Social media crises sometimes happen as a direct result of irresponsible social media practices, for example with GoDaddy and Chrysler. Social media users should be press trained, responsible, good at writing, and higher up than an intern.
- There is a difference between acknowledging and apologizing during a crisis. First, you should acknowledge, and frequently, and you should do so publicly in the channel where it began. For example, if a customer is tweeting about a customer service issue, it makes sense to reply to them on Twitter with an offer to talk by phone.
- It’s best to use an official brand account during a crisis instead of influential individuals’, though you should do everything in your power to make it clear there is a person or team of people behind it, such as including who tweets from it in the bio.
