Handling social media crisis demands patience and sobriety. Never be scared and touch the panic button. This is probably the most important piece of advice you will ever need.
One of the most effective solutions to successful social media crisis handling is pre-crisis planning.
It is difficult to handle a social media crisis until you identify the crisis.
You may presumably require some sort of social media listening software to alert you during a crisis. Alternately, you should have a social media listening protocol within your organization. The employee/s should know when and where to listen and know what is and what is not a social; media crisis.
Not all crises can be dealt with by the same response team. If the crisis is more acute the issue, some senior managerial staff must deal with the issue. It is worthwhile to prepare a crisis flowchart that specifies which employee in your organization should deal with different scenarios.
Some professionals suggest creating a crisis FAQ as a guide to employee/s who deal with social media crisis.
A social media crisis has the potential to adversely impact your business. Experts say that social media crisis occurs when there is a sharp departure from the norm. For instance, when a strikingly different form of criticism appears, that is a sure sign of a social media crisis.
A social media crisis is there when information asymmetry takes place. This is to say, your business knows much less about the happenings within your own organization than the public at large.
You may never know where a crisis will occur. Thus, you must have presences in every social media site, even if you are not actively participating there. This would enable you to respond to questions with a link instead of a detailed answer and thus save time and possible misrepresentation of facts.
If there are some genuine complaints from a disgruntled customer, contact him/her immediately and redress their grievances. If you are at fault, be magnanimous to acknowledge and apologize. This will send a signal you care for the customer.
It is said that you should preferably fight social media fire with water and not fire. But, depending on the size and complexity of your organization – you may need a legal cell to handle mischievous messaging by some unscrupulous competitor or other vested interests.
