Every crisis is a social media crisis
How to plan for a problem before it happens and how to respond when everything goes south
By Lisa Manfield
February 25, 2011
February 25, 2011
If you’ve ever blogged about a negative customer experience, joined a Facebook group to rail against an insensitive employer or scanned the trending Twitter topics with an eye to seething rage, you know that people love to air their grievances online. Thousands of people use social media channels daily to express their displeasure about bad service, complain about flawed products and mock marketing campaigns, brands and, well, just about anything that irks them. Many businesses drown in this flood of ire, but savvy companies can find ways to turn the tide and avert a PR disaster by engaging their community and using social media channels to their advantage.
The case of Pavement Patty
Such was the case on September 9, 2010, as The Community Against Preventable Injuries (Preventable.ca) launched a safety campaign in B.C. that garnered immediate negative reaction online on a global scale.
The campaign, designed to raise driver awareness about kids on the road during the first week back at school, included the installation of a large decal on a West Vancouver street that created a 3D illusion of a girl chasing a ball into the road. Combined with accompanying roadside signage, the girl-shaped decal, which became known as Pavement Patty, was intended to cause approaching drivers to slow down. Instead, it sparked outrage in blogs, on Twitter and on Facebook from people who were concerned the illusion would cause drivers to swerve into traffic, or worse, desensitize them to kids on the road.
“We had thousands of comments, tweets and feedback,” said Pauline Hadley-Beauregard, vice-president, managing director at Wasserman+Partners Advertising, the public relations firm that oversaw the campaign. “The whole strategy was about starting conversation, addressing misinterpretations and turning them around.”
And the campaign was deemed successful thanks to a carefully crafted social media plan that identified potential risks and provided a clear process for dealing with negative buzz. “We knew what the issues might be,” Hadley-Beauregard said, “and we prepared to respond to them.”
“Preventable took measures to mitigate the road risks by working with the RCMP and the City of West Vancouver,” said Liv Hung, new media, connection planner at Wasserman+Partners. Meanwhile, Wasserman+Partners also took measures to lessen the social media risks. The campaign kickoff included a blog post explaining how the decal worked, along with a YouTube video that demonstrated the 3D image in action. “We promoted the blog post through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, and our team monitored the conversation and paid attention to common questions,” Hung said. “We addressed comments on blogs, replied to Twitter comments and published the next post to address the misinformation. It showed we were listening and encouraged more conversation.”
While initial responses to the campaign included comments like “A profoundly bad, ill-conceived idea,” “dangerous,” and “significant risks,” by the time the second blog post went up two days later the mood had shifted to include comments like “innovative, outside the box proactive approach,” “a very noble initiative,” and “an excellent idea.”
How did they engineer such a turnaround? “The misunderstandings were about what actually happened on the road,” said Hadley-Beauregard, “and we knew people might take it different ways. One MSN anchor said ‘That’s a dumb idea.’”
But the technical issues had ready answers, and success ultimately came down to understanding how to use the social media surge to their advantage. “We took advantage of the interest and used it to get more press,” Hung said. “Social media made it into a global conversation.”
Ultimately, it was a conversation that spawned 50 stories internationally, including coverage on CNN.com, Fox and the BBC, as well as multiple follow-ups as the campaign progressed. Preventable even received purchase requests for the decal as people began to understand that it was not dangerous.
A key factor is that the conversation was seeded two years prior. “We were running year-round campaigns for Preventable to engage British Columbians in discussion around preventing injuries, so we had a built-in community,” Hung said. “We started two years ago with this client, and we’ve built blogger relations and identified who the influencers are. Had we not had that in place, we would have been scrambling.”
Social media disasters all too common
Google “social media crisis” and you’ll find no shortage of examples of companies that have been subject to social media-fuelled outrage. Some, like Cooks Source Magazine, a small New England publication that was outed last year for infringing upon a writer’s copyright, are perhaps unaware of social media’s power to uncover transgressions, make them public and invite discussion, debate and spite. In this case, the response from Cook Source’s editor to the writer’s request for compensation, according to Wikipedia, “has become the stuff of Internet legend” in so far as it added fuel to the social media fire. The issue drew 6,000 angry comments on the magazine’s Facebook page.
Others, including giant corporations like Gap, which was recently forced to scrap its new logo, have underestimated the desire for brand engagement and loyalty fuelled by social media channels. Customers protested the new logo with more than 2,000 comments to Gap’s Facebook page, a fake Twitter account in the new logo’s sad voice (“I HAD feelings. Jerks. Now I’m just numb – I don’t know who I am anymore!”) and user-generated spoof designs at www.makeyourowngaplogo.com. Gap finally relented and reverted to its existing logo, admitting the company had missed the chance to engage its community in the logo redesign process.
Vancouver social media consultant Monica Hamburg concedes that one of the perils of social media is that the customer has a voice. “And sometimes people can be difficult,” she said. But she advises her clients against ignoring social media. “Social media is not going away and hoping that it will simply leaves you lagging behind. Your customers are already online and companies must pay attention to what people are saying—both the positive and the negative.”
As the author of Your Dose of Lunacy (www.yourdoseoflunacy.com), Hamburg not only blogs about the humour she finds in the endless stream of social media marketing fails, she also teaches businesses how to use Twitter effectively. “It’s important to have a sense of humour about everything—especially the things you mess up. Bringing humour allows people to relate to you. It’s like being a street entertainer: if you’re not interesting, people will move on because there’s a lot going on.”
And watch your trigger finger, because social media makes it all too easy to post off-the-cuff comments that could come back to haunt your company. Hamburg cites the example of a Vancouver director who posted furious comments on a local blog that had critiqued his play and banned the blogger in question from his future shows. “I realize how sensitive you are when something is yours but you need to sit down and breathe before responding,” Hamburg said.
If you don’t take a moment to pull back, you risk saying something that could launch an online backlash, which is exactly what happened to the director. And Google never forgets. Once you’ve posted something online, it’s pretty tough to erase it completely, even if you do smooth it over with humour.
Every crisis is a social media crisis
Of course, in some cases there’s no time to stop and think when a crisis erupts. And that’s when advance planning comes into play. “When you’re involved in a crisis, that’s the worst time to plan because panic mode sets in, your vision is narrow and you’re in defence mode,” Hamburg said. “And if you don’t have an online reputation already established, then you don’t have that to fall back on.”
For companies accustomed to traditional crisis communications plans, social media presents numerous challenges, said Patti Schom-Moffat, co-general manager of global public relations firm Edelman Canada. “Corporations are so used to the command and control approach, and social media is the opposite.”
She looks to the airline industry as an example of a sector that manages crises well. “They understand the nature of business and crisis. When they have a crisis, it’s usually very serious and what they say matters in the first five minutes.”
While the timeliness of your response is crucial with social media, companies also need to pay close attention to the authenticity of their voice. “In a crisis, the level of scrutiny around your response is intense. So don’t put the most junior person on your social media channels,” she said. “Put the most senior person on, because he or she must have a personality that represents your culture, particularly when there’s little time to react.”
Two invaluable tools for immediate online communication, Schom-Moffat said, are a holding statement and a dark site. “A holding statement is what you say regardless of the nature of the crisis,” she explained. This is a general statement expressing sympathy or promising information within a specific timeframe, so that people aren’t left waiting.
A dark site is “a Web site that is ready to go, and if a crisis occurs you press play and it’s live. It’s not your regular site, it’s specific to a crisis with relevant phone numbers, etc. In a crisis you’re not chatting, you’re providing timely information.”
Of course, avoiding a crisis altogether may be the best prevention, and in this sense social media is a lot like Scouts training: be prepared. “The difference between something being a crisis and not is preparation,” Schom-Moffat said. “It doesn’t have to be a crisis response, it can simply be approached as issue management.”
SIDEBAR
“All crises are social media crises,” said PR and communications strategist Patti Schom-Moffat, co-general manager of Edelman Canada. Here she shares her best practices for mitigating social media disasters.
1 Have a plan. “Crisis preparation is the very best practice for social media. What you say in a crisis affects your reputation, so have employees practise saying it.”
2 Build a community. “Don’t start a Twitter account during a crisis. Build up a constituency and work on your reputation before there is a problem.”
3 Have an online monitoring system. “Keep up with the latest tools (like Radian6) and make a list of everything you need to monitor, including blogs, forums, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Know what is being said about you.”
5 Have restraint. “Don’t go after negative statements one after another; there could be thousands of tweets and you can’t respond to each one. Instead, send the key information to your influencers.”
6 Have a transparent approach. “If you’re playing in the social media sphere, poke yourself in the eye before someone else does. Tell the truth, and then respond.”
Illustration: Enrico Varrasso
Backbone's Social Media blog
The case of Pavement Patty
Such was the case on September 9, 2010, as The Community Against Preventable Injuries (Preventable.ca) launched a safety campaign in B.C. that garnered immediate negative reaction online on a global scale.
The campaign, designed to raise driver awareness about kids on the road during the first week back at school, included the installation of a large decal on a West Vancouver street that created a 3D illusion of a girl chasing a ball into the road. Combined with accompanying roadside signage, the girl-shaped decal, which became known as Pavement Patty, was intended to cause approaching drivers to slow down. Instead, it sparked outrage in blogs, on Twitter and on Facebook from people who were concerned the illusion would cause drivers to swerve into traffic, or worse, desensitize them to kids on the road.
“We had thousands of comments, tweets and feedback,” said Pauline Hadley-Beauregard, vice-president, managing director at Wasserman+Partners Advertising, the public relations firm that oversaw the campaign. “The whole strategy was about starting conversation, addressing misinterpretations and turning them around.”
And the campaign was deemed successful thanks to a carefully crafted social media plan that identified potential risks and provided a clear process for dealing with negative buzz. “We knew what the issues might be,” Hadley-Beauregard said, “and we prepared to respond to them.”
“Preventable took measures to mitigate the road risks by working with the RCMP and the City of West Vancouver,” said Liv Hung, new media, connection planner at Wasserman+Partners. Meanwhile, Wasserman+Partners also took measures to lessen the social media risks. The campaign kickoff included a blog post explaining how the decal worked, along with a YouTube video that demonstrated the 3D image in action. “We promoted the blog post through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, and our team monitored the conversation and paid attention to common questions,” Hung said. “We addressed comments on blogs, replied to Twitter comments and published the next post to address the misinformation. It showed we were listening and encouraged more conversation.”
While initial responses to the campaign included comments like “A profoundly bad, ill-conceived idea,” “dangerous,” and “significant risks,” by the time the second blog post went up two days later the mood had shifted to include comments like “innovative, outside the box proactive approach,” “a very noble initiative,” and “an excellent idea.”
How did they engineer such a turnaround? “The misunderstandings were about what actually happened on the road,” said Hadley-Beauregard, “and we knew people might take it different ways. One MSN anchor said ‘That’s a dumb idea.’”
But the technical issues had ready answers, and success ultimately came down to understanding how to use the social media surge to their advantage. “We took advantage of the interest and used it to get more press,” Hung said. “Social media made it into a global conversation.”
Ultimately, it was a conversation that spawned 50 stories internationally, including coverage on CNN.com, Fox and the BBC, as well as multiple follow-ups as the campaign progressed. Preventable even received purchase requests for the decal as people began to understand that it was not dangerous.
A key factor is that the conversation was seeded two years prior. “We were running year-round campaigns for Preventable to engage British Columbians in discussion around preventing injuries, so we had a built-in community,” Hung said. “We started two years ago with this client, and we’ve built blogger relations and identified who the influencers are. Had we not had that in place, we would have been scrambling.”
Social media disasters all too common
Google “social media crisis” and you’ll find no shortage of examples of companies that have been subject to social media-fuelled outrage. Some, like Cooks Source Magazine, a small New England publication that was outed last year for infringing upon a writer’s copyright, are perhaps unaware of social media’s power to uncover transgressions, make them public and invite discussion, debate and spite. In this case, the response from Cook Source’s editor to the writer’s request for compensation, according to Wikipedia, “has become the stuff of Internet legend” in so far as it added fuel to the social media fire. The issue drew 6,000 angry comments on the magazine’s Facebook page.
Others, including giant corporations like Gap, which was recently forced to scrap its new logo, have underestimated the desire for brand engagement and loyalty fuelled by social media channels. Customers protested the new logo with more than 2,000 comments to Gap’s Facebook page, a fake Twitter account in the new logo’s sad voice (“I HAD feelings. Jerks. Now I’m just numb – I don’t know who I am anymore!”) and user-generated spoof designs at www.makeyourowngaplogo.com. Gap finally relented and reverted to its existing logo, admitting the company had missed the chance to engage its community in the logo redesign process.
Vancouver social media consultant Monica Hamburg concedes that one of the perils of social media is that the customer has a voice. “And sometimes people can be difficult,” she said. But she advises her clients against ignoring social media. “Social media is not going away and hoping that it will simply leaves you lagging behind. Your customers are already online and companies must pay attention to what people are saying—both the positive and the negative.”
As the author of Your Dose of Lunacy (www.yourdoseoflunacy.com), Hamburg not only blogs about the humour she finds in the endless stream of social media marketing fails, she also teaches businesses how to use Twitter effectively. “It’s important to have a sense of humour about everything—especially the things you mess up. Bringing humour allows people to relate to you. It’s like being a street entertainer: if you’re not interesting, people will move on because there’s a lot going on.”
And watch your trigger finger, because social media makes it all too easy to post off-the-cuff comments that could come back to haunt your company. Hamburg cites the example of a Vancouver director who posted furious comments on a local blog that had critiqued his play and banned the blogger in question from his future shows. “I realize how sensitive you are when something is yours but you need to sit down and breathe before responding,” Hamburg said.
If you don’t take a moment to pull back, you risk saying something that could launch an online backlash, which is exactly what happened to the director. And Google never forgets. Once you’ve posted something online, it’s pretty tough to erase it completely, even if you do smooth it over with humour.
Every crisis is a social media crisis
Of course, in some cases there’s no time to stop and think when a crisis erupts. And that’s when advance planning comes into play. “When you’re involved in a crisis, that’s the worst time to plan because panic mode sets in, your vision is narrow and you’re in defence mode,” Hamburg said. “And if you don’t have an online reputation already established, then you don’t have that to fall back on.”
For companies accustomed to traditional crisis communications plans, social media presents numerous challenges, said Patti Schom-Moffat, co-general manager of global public relations firm Edelman Canada. “Corporations are so used to the command and control approach, and social media is the opposite.”
She looks to the airline industry as an example of a sector that manages crises well. “They understand the nature of business and crisis. When they have a crisis, it’s usually very serious and what they say matters in the first five minutes.”
While the timeliness of your response is crucial with social media, companies also need to pay close attention to the authenticity of their voice. “In a crisis, the level of scrutiny around your response is intense. So don’t put the most junior person on your social media channels,” she said. “Put the most senior person on, because he or she must have a personality that represents your culture, particularly when there’s little time to react.”
Two invaluable tools for immediate online communication, Schom-Moffat said, are a holding statement and a dark site. “A holding statement is what you say regardless of the nature of the crisis,” she explained. This is a general statement expressing sympathy or promising information within a specific timeframe, so that people aren’t left waiting.
A dark site is “a Web site that is ready to go, and if a crisis occurs you press play and it’s live. It’s not your regular site, it’s specific to a crisis with relevant phone numbers, etc. In a crisis you’re not chatting, you’re providing timely information.”
Of course, avoiding a crisis altogether may be the best prevention, and in this sense social media is a lot like Scouts training: be prepared. “The difference between something being a crisis and not is preparation,” Schom-Moffat said. “It doesn’t have to be a crisis response, it can simply be approached as issue management.”
SIDEBAR
“All crises are social media crises,” said PR and communications strategist Patti Schom-Moffat, co-general manager of Edelman Canada. Here she shares her best practices for mitigating social media disasters.
1 Have a plan. “Crisis preparation is the very best practice for social media. What you say in a crisis affects your reputation, so have employees practise saying it.”
2 Build a community. “Don’t start a Twitter account during a crisis. Build up a constituency and work on your reputation before there is a problem.”
3 Have an online monitoring system. “Keep up with the latest tools (like Radian6) and make a list of everything you need to monitor, including blogs, forums, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Know what is being said about you.”
5 Have restraint. “Don’t go after negative statements one after another; there could be thousands of tweets and you can’t respond to each one. Instead, send the key information to your influencers.”
6 Have a transparent approach. “If you’re playing in the social media sphere, poke yourself in the eye before someone else does. Tell the truth, and then respond.”
Illustration: Enrico Varrasso
Backbone's Social Media blog
