Thinking about a B2B Social Media Crisis Communication Plan
By Jeffrey L. Cohen
Fri, Apr 2, 2010
Once a B2B company reaches a certain size, you begin considering hiring a public relations firm to help get your message out using an earned media approach. One of the first recommendations of many PR plans includes developing crisis communication documents. There are two primary reasons for this. Your new agency wants to encourage you to make good decisions and craft well-thought-out responses when your company is not under the pressure and scrutiny of a crisis. This will make your ultimate response better. They also want to be aware of any skeletons in your closet as a means of assessing the need for a crisis plan. This is a big part of PR and people who specialize in this field can give you many more justifications and examples for why this is a good idea, but I just want to use its essence of being prepared with regard to social media.
You may have heard of the recent coordinated attack on the Nestle Facebook page. If not, here’s a search result page. Even though much has been written about it, and it’s not the point of this post, here are my thoughts on what Nestle should do in this specific situation:
- Create a statement that addresses community concern and clear change of policy.
- Post this statement on their home page.
- Resume tweeting and continue to post this statement.
- Create a landing page on Facebook with this statement. This way the first view of their Facebook page is the statement, not the wall filled with negative comments.
- While there is no way to stop the comments on the wall, they should create discussion topics and encourage commenters to leave their comments in the discussion threads. This gives Nestle a bit more control and starts to move the comments off the wall.
As you begin thinking about a social media crisis communication plan, look at your pr crisis communication plan. Based on that approach and those documents, here are some steps to begin developing a similar plan for social media outlets.
- Review all potential issues that are included in your pr plan and prepare social media content around each one.
- Create tweets that respond to issues with a link to a statement.
- Determine if you will respond directly to other Twitter users, and if so, in what tone. Social media responses differ from pr responses, as you are communicating with individual people directly, but in a public forum.
- Know when to take conversations off-line. The answer may be for anything beyond the initial public statement.
- Establish a Facebook response approach. Because wall posts become permanently associated with your brand, unless you take them down, you must understand how to respond, if you are responding at all.
- Think about a response on LinkedIn, where there may be no mention of the crisis issue at all. Publish your statement in any groups in which your company or employees are active. This pro-active approach will earn you some respect on the most professional of social networks.
- Consider a video response for YouTube. While many CEO or executive videos seem canned or stilted, remember that you are communicating with people, and a video may be another way to speak directly to people. The preparation for this would involve determining the appropriate person for different situations and determining the shooting location. It might not be the corporate video studio.
- Review your social media presence and craft a unique response strategy for each online community where you have a following. This includes forums, social bookmarking sites and industry specific communities.
- Don’t forget about your employees. They are all now public representatives of your company and they will want to share information with their networks. And they will want positive and honest information that they are comfortable sharing. The last thing they want to do is promote corporate double talk around an issue. Their mom might even be their friend on Facebook.
Have you started thinking about a social media crisis communication strategy? What other things have you included?
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Tags: best practices, Facebook, linkedin, Nestle, PR, public relations, Twitter
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GREAT post, Jeff. This is a topic I thinking about before the Social Fresh Portland B2B panel, but unfortunately, we didn’t get to talk about it there. You pretty much covered everything here, but another thing to think about is how to determine when something is a crisis and what actually deserves a response. For example, if someone started tweeting that xyz company sucks and only has 1 follower, it’s probably better to do nothing.
How do you think a company should determine when something is actually a crisis and when to kick off their crisis communication plan?
Great ideas here, Jeff. I especially like your suggestion of the CEO YouTube.com. If the tone is honest and transparent, video has the ability to communicate in ways that other text-based channels (e-mail, Twitter, letter statements, press releases) cannot.
The excuses of omitting social media from Crisis PR Communications Plans simply no longer carry merit. The online world provides a platform for people to respond to brands in real time. And unlike a traditional word-of-mouth crisis which eventually fades over time (or until the next crisis hits – John Edwards, Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, Enron, etc) the web has a postmark that lives on forever.
I’m glad you made the point “Create tweets that respond to issues with a link to a statement.” In my opinion, responding to the issue at hand is the most critical part of crisis pr – social or traditional. You simply can’t spin/spit positive news while your audiences want answers to the issue of concern. I was disappointed yesterday when GlaxoSmithKline’s PR team tried to slide around a serious crisis involving one of their drugs potentially increasing the risk of heart failure.
Article except:
“A statement issued by GlaxoSmithKline touted the positive results of dutasteride reducing the risk of prostate cancer but did not address the heart-failure issue. Spokeswoman Sarah Alspach told the Associated Press that the heart-failure rate published in the New England Journal of Medicine report “is unexpected and inconsistent” with previous testing of the drug.”
http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2010/03/29/daily39.html (from @TriangleBizJRNL)
GSK took a Web 1.0 crisis PR approach in a Web 2.0 world. Above all else, this response tells the public that GSK simply isn’t listening. Or worse, they don’t care.
So I guess the question for companies is: are you listening? Or are you just talking? If it’s only one, you’re missing the whole point, as well as the opportunity to be successful in today’s crisis PR approach.
Jason
Thanks for the comments. Part of the crisis communication plan would include the determination of what constitutes a crisis. The point of the plan is to prevent surprises so you know when the plan kicks in.
Ryal
Thanks for your thoughts and the GSK example. It is a great reminder that part of social media is listening, and that continues to be an important part of a social media crisis communication plan. This is part of what makes social media different and allows companies to modify their approach to a situation by listening to the community response.
Jeff,
I really enjoyed this post. I agree with your comment that the crisis communication plan needs to include the determination of what constitutes a crisis to avoid surprises.
These kinds of plans are not generic documents that say INSERT COMPANY NAME HERE and can be applied to any company. They need to be tailored to the specific business. For example, if you are dealing with a restaurant, you need to detail every possible crisis that you can think of from foodborne illness to armed robbery. Have a plan in place not only for public response, but even more importantly for internal communication. Who receives the first call and how do they determine who to call next?
Just a statement will no longer suffice and several businesses are learning that firsthand as the conversation takes place without them online because they just did not take the time to prepare. You offer some great suggestions on avenues these companies should be exploring now, before the crisis occurs.
Kate
Thanks for the feedback and the reminder that these plans are not generic for any company. And I think the other side of that is that messaging for any social network or community is not generic either. Messages must be customized for each.
Absolutely – that is so important. This is great information, Jeff.
Good post, Jeff. Of course, having a crisis plan is NOT the same as having a crisis management capability — and this is even more important in the turbo-speed requirements of managing a social media crisis. The difference between plan and capability lies in training, applied expertise, access to seasoned counsel, internal alignment and finding the authentic/experienced voice that can put context on the crisis. Your post is a great start…but there’s a lot more required for companies to be truly prepared.
JD:
Thanks for adding that fantastic point. All the planning in the world won’t help you unless you have the people who can properly execute those plans.