CHAPTER 25
Responding to Social Media Crisis
Since the dawn of the Internet, businesses have had to deal with a variety of unexpected events hurting their brand image. What was once governed by the 24-hour news cycle is now almost immediate. For the PR professional, crisis management is reinventing their role in the organization. This is not all that different than what your Customer Service teams deal with every day! There is a lot PR professionals can learn from service, and vice versa. But, in my view, the crisis is greater than these groups even imagine. Depending on your brand, conversations all over the web are becoming critical to your brand. They influence prospective Customers or employees searching out their next career move. This, in many ways is a revolution against brands. With this shift in control, we have to learn better, more creative, ways to be part of the conversation.
What can a company do? How can you defend against that? What do you say? The only way to truly fix and then prevent against these external issues is to fix the underlying problems that may exist within your company, allowing you to slowly mend your reputation. There are companies that will sell you a quick fix in reputation management, but often what they are really doing is manipulating data or search results, not truly fixing the underlying cause. So how do you deal with this type of commentary?
Social media crises can be very unique in comparison to traditional crisis management. Speed has ...
