How to Manage a Social Media Crisis Without Losing Your Mind

How to Manage a Social Media Crisis Without Losing Your Mind A social media crisis is something most brands will encounter at some point in time. Some will be more serious than others, but a solid social media crisis plan can help you better manage the situation and mitigate damages. Maybe an intern accidentally posted on the company account (instead of a personal profile). Or, a major mistake (understandable or not) might spark online outrage amongst your audience. Whatever the case, marketers and social media managers need to be prepared, which is why every company should have a social media crisis management plan in place. Equipped with your crisis survival guide, you’ll be prepared for even the worst situations. How to Manage a Social Media Crisis Without Losing Your Mind via @Document Your Social Media Crisis Plan Before we dig into the nuts and bolts of crisis planning, snag your free template to put together a complete crisis communication strategy. Use this post as a guide to complete it. Then, keep it somewhere easily accessible for your team, and youll be ready for the worst. Awesome news! Youre invited to a 1on1 marketing demo of ! In 30 mins or less, you can see howtoGet your free social media crisis management plan template from @What Qualifies As a Social Media Crisis? First, we need to be clear about what is (and isn’t) a crisis. Linking to the wrong blog post on a social message – a minor mistake, but definitely not of crisis proportions. Using a national disaster to promote your products and receiving backlash for it – definitely something that falls into the crisis category. The first scenario happens from time to time. Humans make mistakes. We're all busy and sometimes minor things slip through the cracks. The second situation, however, is obviously urgent. A strategic choice has led to some major issues and could do the brand major damage. So, you get the idea. But, how do you actually separate day-to-day hiccups from genuine catastrophes? When it comes to social media problems, how do you actually separate day-to-day hiccups from...Create a Social Media Crisis Scale Convince and Convert  devised a great solution to this problem. They built a customer response flowchart that matches the severity of an issue, to the right course of action. Here’s what theirs looks like: You can create something similar by establishing five levels of issue severity: Customer service question: Routine inquiries that your customer support team can answer. Here's an example from Delta: This customer reached out on Twitter with a question regarding frequent flyer upgrades. An angry customer: More than just a question, this person is actively upset. Allow customer service or PR to respond, with a manager’s guidance. Here's an example from United: Several angry customers: If you have several (let’s say ten or more) customers complaining about the same issue in the space of an hour, get a customer service manager or PR specialist directly on the appropriate social channel. Here's an example from Instagram when the platform experienced an outage. Something terrible just happened: In the event of a major news catastrophe, shut down all scheduled social media posts. If there’s a serious defect with a product, your service is down, or something similar, consider creating content answering common questions. Get senior-level managers, PR, or marketing and the C-Suite involved. Issue statements, apologies, etc. Here's an example of how Samsung handled a terrible incident when its Galaxy Note 7 mobile phones were recalled due to safety issues. Your brand is serious jeopardy: There's been a misstep in communication and something was handled poorly resulting in lawsuits, public backlash, and boycotting.   Consider getting a statement from your CEO, or reissuing an apology and admitting your mistakes. Involve your senior-level managers, customer service, PR, and marketing staff and monitor the situation closely. Here's an example from an incident where United handled the removal of a passenger poorly resulting in broken bones and unnecessary force. Following the incident, an internal statement from the CEO went public after reaffirming his support for employees while describing the passenger as "disruptive and belligerent." After, the public was outraged and resulted in the CEO issuing an apology, new regulations and nearly $1 billion axed from its market value on the stock market. Here are some examples of situations that would fit each level: Crisis Level 1: Isolated customer complaints and questions. Crisis Level 2: Angry customers, broken links, posts directing to the wrong page, factual inaccuracies, major misspellings on social posts. Crisis Level 3: High volume of angry customers, service outages, lack of product availability. Crisis Level 4: Product recalls, defective services or products, widespread negative press coverage, layoffs. Crisis Level 5: Lawsuits, serious accidents resulting in injury, illegal employee conduct. This isn’t a scientific scale, but it should give you some idea of how to prioritize. Unless it’s above Level 2, it’s really not a crisis at all. If it’s less than a Level 3, it most likely does not need to be escalated past your customer service team, or routine PR messaging. Here's how to identify a social media crisis using a five-point scaleIdentifying a Crisis Using Social Listening Now you know what a crisis looks like. Next, let’s walk through how to spot them as they happen. One of the worst things you can say in a crisis is nothing. So, make sure you’re monitoring what’s being said about your brand is essential for responding promptly. The best way to do this is with social listening. The good news is, you can do this with . You no longer have to have your social message scheduling separate from your social media conversations. Here's how it works: Why should brands use 's new social listening feature to spot a crisis before it spreads?How Can I Tell My Brand Has a Problem? Follow these two steps: Keep an eye on your brand mentions. Check in periodically and use email alerts to stay on top of discussions as they happen. Use your crisis scale to assess problems. Then, respond accordingly. To determine how many negative messages constitutes a crisis, Hootsuite recommends setting crisis thresholds. Here’s an example they outline for a hypothetical sports clothing company: Less than five negative mentions per hour: Continue monitoring closely. Compile a report for senior management to review at the end of the day. More than five negative mentions per hour: Begin assigning messages to the public relations manager in Hootsuite. More than 10 negative mentions per hour, for more than three consecutive hours: Contact the CMO on her cell phone, and begin officially rolling out the social media crisis management plan. You can establish your own thresholds similarly, based on what you might think is reasonable. Recommended Reading: How to Create a Social Media Strategy With 3 Steps and a Template Develop a Plan Before a Crisis Happens Prevention is the best medicine. Short of that, having a plan in place before things go haywire is the next best option. Here are four things to prepare and keep on hand in case of emergency. Establish a Crisis Chain of Command Using your crisis scale, establish who is responsible for managing the response at each level. It might look something like this: Develop an Internal Response Protocol Your employees likely have their own social media accounts. When disaster strikes, they may not know what they can (and can’t) say about the issue publically. So, it’s important to make sure they don’t go rogue or leak information you don’t want to be released. This could make a bad situation worse. Get in front of this with a documented response plan. If a crisis reaches a level 4 or higher, do the following: Send an internal email alerting everyone about the situation. When a problem reaches this stage, people need to know. They should hear about it from their own company before family, friends, or strangers start asking. Provide messaging they can share. They might get asked questions. Either create copy-and-paste messaging they can share or a link to a page they can direct people toward. This will help keep your message consistent and take the pressure off team members to respond (who might not know what to say otherwise). Keep your company up to date. Continue to keep the flow of information open. Let everyone internally know when the issue is resolved. Recommended Reading: How to Complete a Social Media Audit in 9 Steps (Free Template) Secure Social Media Login Credentials This is important for two reasons: If your crisis is the result of a hack, you’ll want to change your passwords. You may want to consider changing login email addresses and usernames, too. If you need to remove something or stop automated posts, it’s important that all authorized staff know where to find the login info. The last thing you need is to have your PR and social teams scrambling to find the Twitter password because the manager is on vacation. The best way to do this is with a shared and secure password repository. Some options include: 1Password Dashlane LastPass KeePass Roboform 8 You can learn more about each of these services via Lifehacker. They all achieve more or less the same goal (and can be used for securing a lot more than just social media credentials). Plus, they make it possible for each member of your team (or at least those who need social account access) to store and secure passwords in one place. Social media crisis management tip: Keep passwords secured and stored somewhere team members can...Craft Emergency Response Messaging Templates When a mistake happens, you may not have time to issue a detailed response right away. However, you’ll need to say something to acknowledge you’re aware of the issue before things get out of hand. Plus, for routine inquiries, it can save time to have messaging ready to help you respond promptly. You don’t need to be beholden to your templates, either. Keep them flexible enough that they can be edited to fit the given situation (and make sure they actually make sense before posting). Here are some copy-and-paste examples you can use. Example 1: Hi [USERNAME], We’re sorry to hear you’ve been experiencing [INSERT PROBLEM]. Our customers expect and deserve better from us. Could you send us a DM with more details? Example 2: This sounds frustrating! Please accept our apologies, we should have resolved [INSERT PROBLEM] before it disrupted your day. Please call us at [INSERT NUMBER] and we’ll take care of this right away. Example 3: We’re extremely sorry to learn [INSERT PROBLEM] has been happening. Fortunately, we do have a solution that should help. Check out [INSERT URL] to find the next steps you should take. If there’s anything else we can do, let us know! Templates like this can help resolve routine inquiries fast. However, be cautious of overusing the same messaging too frequently. It can come across impersonal (though, really, most people will be okay with that as long as their problem gets fixed). If your problem is more than just a customer complaint, though, you’ll need to go into full-on crisis mode.