How can Facebook and Twitter best be used to overcome a crisis?
The use of Twitter by newspapers and broadcasters is extraordinary, given that it’s all done in 140 character chunks. Your company must monitor Twitter mentions of your brands, products and services.
Have a Twitter account set up ahead of a crisis and use it – get conversant with what it can do, use it for marketing so that if a crisis does strike you’ll be ahead of the game and can get information out quickly.
Storm warning
You can’t defend a brand and its reputation if you’re not listening for signs of an impending problem. One under reported aspect of the BP fiasco was that they didn’t think to scoop up relevant BP ‘identities’ on Twitter.
@BPglobalPR sounds like a legitimate arm of BP’s PR machine, but it wasn’t. BP was ‘brandjacked’ on Twitter with tweets appearing such as:
‘Please do not take or clean any oil you find on the beach. That is property of BP and we WILL sue you.’
What does this say about the effectiveness of BP’s PR team in time of crisis? How did an enterprising joker on Twitter manage to fly under the radar using BP’s own name and logo?
Facebook is a great tool for talking directly to all your stakeholders. Create a corporate site in “normal” times and get to know its uses and abuses. In a major crisis you may need a corporate response page where you can post comments and pictures that refer entirely to the on-going incident.
Social media crisis management must dovetail with any existing crisis management plans you have in place. In many ways traditional best practice in crisis management is reflected in the brave new world of social media - it’s just that it now all happens at the speed of light.
No comments:
Post a Comment