A communications crisis can strike at any time. It could be a faulty product, a lousy campaign, or a slip of the tongue from someone higher up.
It doesn’t matter the industry you’re in, or how popular you’ve been to this point. Sometimes, it just happens.
Whatever the case, you need to be prepared. If you’re going to put out a fire, you need a good hose:
So we’ve put together this 10-step crisis management guide to get you ready. Make sure you’ve done everything you need to before disaster strikes.
What’s in this post:
- What you can do before disaster strikes
- What to do during a social crisis
- Steps you can take once the dust settles
- What to do if you’re in a crisis right now!
We’ve also put these steps into a crisis management workbook.
Download and share this with your team, to be sure you’re ready to respond effectively.
Before the event
1. Get your crew together
While every staff member is important, they can’t all be part of your crisis management team.
Put together a group of responsible responders, each with their dedicated role.
You need a good mix of executive personnel (to enforce decisions), management (to coordinate), and creatives (to craft the right message).
Oh, and a lawyer probably helps.
As you build your team, answer the following questions:
- Who will take ownership for the overall strategy – assigning tasks and ensuring the team stays on target?
- Who is responsible for identifying and monitoring potential crises?
- Who’s going to inform management and/or key stakeholders?
- Who will manage social media and respond to questions?
- And who will be handling messages that come in through other channels?
- Which executive will act as a spokesperson for the media?
Get these roles straightened out while you have time to plan.
Next, it’s time to think about what sorts of crisis you might possibly face.
2. Define “a crisis”
You need to decide the kinds of events that will kick your new plan into action.
Not every piece of bad news or negative headline should force you to go “code red.”
For this, you’ll need a working definition of a crisis.
According to Jay Baer, a social media crisis has three characteristics:
- Information asymmetry: When you don’t know any more than the public about what’s going on.
- A change from the norm: Everyday criticism of your products is not a crisis. When your products explode at random – that’s a crisis.
- Serious risk to your company: It seems obvious, but the scope of the issue is important. For something to be a crisis, it needs to have a truly negative effect.
With your new team, set benchmarks and find real examples of what qualifies as a crisis.
An added benefit of this is that you’ll identify potential weaknesses you otherwise might not have thought about.
Since every company is different, it’s a matter of creating a definition that works for you.
Once you’ve done that, you can begin thinking about key steps to take during an event.
3. Identify your key message
How you react publicly during a crisis is likely to define your success.
You could have a great plan and a smart team, but if the message is wrong you’ve got no chance.
You can’t plan your specific response yet since you don’t know what the crisis is. Instead, establish your core values as a company, and your main value proposition to customers.
Whatever your response during the tough times, these should be central.
Why is this important?
Things will be moving at a mile a minute. Despite your best intentions, you can’t monitor everything every spokesperson or social media manager says and posts.
What you can ensure is that they convey the most important information.
If you remind customers why they came to you in the first place, you have a far better chance of keeping them around.
4. Create communication guidelines
Once you’re clear on the basic message, you need to decide how to deliver it.
That means creating guidelines so that anyone writing a social media post knows what’s expected of them.
To get ready for a crisis, do the following:
- Determine rules for communicating with key stakeholders and executives.
- Set network-specific guidelines for communicating on social media (since you’ll have different content and format considerations for each).
- Decide on a process for communicating updates via your website and other online company channels not covered by social media.
- Create guidelines for employees outside of the crisis communications team advising how to respond to inquiries.
To ensure you’re even more prepared, craft some basic templates.
The first of these should be a brief, general statement of the company’s position.
You also need sample answers to the obvious questions you know you’ll receive.
This is your best opportunity to set the tone you’ll use as a company. There may be even room for jokes and light-hearted apologies, as long as they suit your usual social media style.
By preparing these now, you’re more likely to be effective when a crisis breaks, rather than making the situation worse.
5. Monitor for updates
Or in Jay Baer’s words, "buy some binoculars". Get a monitoring tool that’ll help you figure out what’s being said about you, and where.
If you’re trying to see everything happening on social media without a listening tool, good luck.
You’re going to need something that gives you real-time updates and lets you analyze large amounts of data to draw conclusions.
Naturally, we suggest Mention.
It lets you track social media, forums, blogs, and news, and respond to social media posts directly from the app.
Plus, Mention will tip you off if a serious crisis is about to hit. Pulse alerts tell you when your keywords explode online, meaning that everybody is talking about your brand.
You’ll be notified first, so you’re able to respond quickly.
Find out how monitoring can save your brand in a crisis.
Whether or not you use Mention, you need to be clear on three matters:
- What tool(s) will you use to monitor for brand crises?
- Who is responsible for the management of the tool?
- What is the ongoing process for crisis monitoring?
Get these straightened out before a problem strikes, and you’ll have a far easier time when you’re caught off-guard.
During a crisis
6. Get it under control
We’ve put together a checklist that’ll help you right the ship. It’s a step-by-step guide to use when the going gets tough.
For full instructions, you need the checklist. For now, let’s take a look at the highlights:
Pause your scheduled posts
With a mad panic breaking out around you, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got a full social queue.
As Charli Day explains, you can’t afford to accidentally post "Happy #ThrowbackThursday — Have a beautiful day" when your product has just caused a serious injury or death.”
That’s a pretty extreme example, but still a great point.
Publicly acknowledge what’s going on
You’re not going to be able to hide for long - especially on social media.
Your best bet is to make clear that you know there’s a problem, and you’re working to fix it. You’ll still get some angry responses, but it should buy you some time.
Inform your team
You didn’t put a crack squad together for nothing. Contact them quickly and send them to work.
If you respond quickly enough, you may be able to lessen the harm overall.
Post a long-form response on your website
You’ll be sending plenty of small, individualized social media responses.
But you also need one official place where reporters and blog writers can find your side of the story.
Posting this response will also buy you time.
When people want answers fast, you’ll have a place to send them while you work on more important matters.
One final piece of advice: “do not lose your cool. Ever.”
Once the dust settles, it’s time to figure out what went wrong.
After a social media crisis
7. Assess brand impact
This is where your monitoring tool comes in handy again.
You should have data showing what a normal business week looks like, to compare with your “crisis week”. You’ll quickly know just how bad things became.
From a social media perspective, focus on factors like lost followers, specific complaints, and the amount of negative sentiment around your brand.
You’ll also be able to see where your response was most effective.
You may have spent countless hours scouring Twitter and responding to individuals, and yet one Facebook post reached more people and was widely shared.
These kinds of insights help you understand how badly your reputation was hit, and you’ll be able to plan better for the future.
The key questions for this section of your plan are:
- What will your KPIs for successful crisis management be?
- How will you measure the negative conversations generated?
- How will you measure the impact on overall brand sentiment?
- How will you measure the overall brand impact of this over time?
Make sure you have a monitoring tool that lets you do all of this, and anything else you choose to include in your plan.
You also need to collect data before a crisis arises, to benchmark against. If you know what a “normal” week looks like, you’ll be able to accurately assess the bad times.
8. Reflect on your response
Once it looks like you’re out of the woods, it’s important to take stock of your response.
Hopefully, you had a great plan in place, and everyone knew exactly what was required of them.
As part of your plan, make time to regroup after the event, and discuss how it went. Key questions to work through include:
- What were the strongest aspects of your brand’s crisis plan?
- Where was the existing strategy unhelpful or less impactful?
- Are there any processes or templates that need to be revised?
- Do you need to create any new systems or guidelines?
Discuss the different experiences of management, administrative, and customer support staff.
Did everyone feel ready to respond, and what other resources would have helped when things got hectic?
9. Prepare for the long-term
Unfortunately, negative news and complaints can linger far longer than a week or two.
You need to decide what your response will look like moving forward.
It might not be best to act like everything is now fixed. Instead, you may want to be proactive, offering updates and solutions to help customers get through a tough time.
These are the big questions to ask yourself:
- How will you manage or participate in the long-term conversation about this event?
- Do you need to provide continual updates long-term to any of your audiences?
Again, your monitoring tool will be invaluable here.
Not only will you hear if things quickly begin to spiral (again), but you’ll be able to show sentiment improving over time, and find positive feedback to share with your community.
10. Update your crisis management plan
The last step is to revisit the first nine steps.
This may have been your first chance to test out your crisis management plan, so you need to figure out if it worked.
Hopefully, you won’t get another opportunity for some time, so this is the time to make changes.
Move through each section of your plan and make any changes that need to be made. Make the necessary fixes to ensure your crisis management plan is as good as it needs to be.
So those were our 10 steps to get you prepared. You're all set!
But how do you respond if a crisis is already at your door? Our own Brittany Berger walks you through this difficult time:
What to do in the face of an ugly social media crisis
No brand wants to find themselves in a social media crisis, but every brand needs to be prepared for.
It’s one of those “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” things. Like insurance.
You can’t let yourself and your communications team go in denial and pretend it could never happen.
One viral, “didn’t think it through” tweet.
One screenshotted SnapChat.
One employee logging into the wrong account.
That’s all it takes to have a crisis on your hands, my friend. And if it happens, you need a game plan, and you need one bad.
And here’s what it should include.
Want to save a quick list of these steps...just in case? Download the free PDF!
1. Determine whether or not it’s a real social media crisis
First of all, is the situation really a crisis? There’s a big difference between a sticky situation and a full-blown disaster.
Sure, both are bad, but there’s a big difference that dictates how your brand needs to react.
So you obviously want to make sure the crisis is real and you’re not overreacting. No one likes a drama queen.
Ask yourself: will this have a real, lasting impact on our brand? Will it impact business results, or is it just talk?
We’ve all seen it: a Facebook friend getting totally outraged and going on a tirade about a brand for something that’s not even a big deal.
And we all have that friend who needs a brand to be angry at in order to survive on social media. It’s who they are, and we love them anyway.
With how easy it is for people to become keyboard warriors and how quickly something can go viral, not every sticky situation will have an impact.
It’s perfectly possible to just move on without going into full-on crisis mode.
When things get more serious, however, is when a situation really will drive away customers and have other lasting impacts on your business, your employees, etc.
Now, only your brand knows your customers well enough to determine that about a social media disaster.
But when people start angry tweeting you on social media, take a look at who they are. Are they your customers, your audience?
Basically, who cares?
And I don’t mean that like, “Ugh, who cares?” I actually want you to answer that.
Are the people angry with your brand actually your target audience or an important audience to you, or are they people outside of your important markets?
It’s never nice to piss people off, but if they’re not your audience or customers, it may not be a crisis.
2. Pause your scheduled posts
If something is a crisis, the first thing you wanna do is go into “crisis control” mode.
That means not asking people to buy from you when the whole internet is mad at you. Timing is everything, after all.
Press “pause” on any campaigns and content you’d planned to put out on social media, and you may want to consider altering your schedule on other online channels, too.
The benefit here is two-fold:
First of all, as mentioned before, a crisis is not a great time to be marketing and selling.
People aren’t happy with you, and people need to be happy to buy.
Secondly, this frees up your whole team to focus 100% on getting the crisis under control.
It should be your number one priority, not a marketing campaign that will fail if everyone hates you, anyway.
3. Publicly acknowledge what’s going on
Staying in contact with your audiences during a social media crisis is so, so important.
Beyond effectively communicating updates, you already need to comfort people by showing them you’re there and you care.
As soon as possible, acknowledge your brand’s problem or crisis on social media.
Even if you don’t have a solution or real updates yet, put something out that tells your audience that you’re aware of what’s going on.
This lets people know that you’ve jumped on the issue quickly and care about solving it, as well as where to go for more updates.
At this point, it doesn't need to be anything more than a short post on each important channel.
You may want to consider reposting it a time or two within the same time frame to ensure your followers see it.
4. Create a social crisis action plan
Once you’ve checked in with your audience and let them know what’s up, it’s time to go into problem-solving mode.
It’s time to put your crisis communications plan into action.
Part of being prepared for a crisis means in addition to learning these 10 steps today, you’re also starting to work on them.
You need a crisis comms plan long before a crisis happens as it guides your team in responding.
If you don’t know where to start, our free crisis communication workbook can help.
Basically, you want to decide what steps your team will take during a crisis, which team members will perform each task, and how you’ll communicate with each other and your public.
5. Inform your team
In addition to giving a heads up about the situation to your audience, you also absolutely have to consider any other stakeholders at the company.
Executive leadership obviously needs to know what’s going on, as they do with anything big happening to the company.
Additionally, they might have to field questions from people about it and should be primed with a response.
Any support or customer-facing positions should be pulled into the loop as well.
They may have customers and prospects coming to them with questions that they should feel confident in answering.
6. Work quickly but thoroughly
A social media crisis is not the time for perfectionism. You have a fire to put out, and the longer you wait, the more it will breathe and spread.
Your social media crisis communication plan should be lean and minimal. Once the crisis is over, you can focus on the lower priority parts of crisis management - now’s the time for high, DEFCON 1-level to-dos.
Work quickly by carefully and accurately. The last thing you need to do while dealing with one crisis is to start another crisis!
I won’t lie - this is tough. Toeing the line between “fast but effective” and “sloppy and confusing” can be quite the balancing act.
7. Give your audience frequent updates
It’s so important to stay in close touch with your audience in the middle of a social crisis.
For one, social media is real-time and your posts “expire” quickly in terms of reach.
Someone may not have seen your tweet from a few hours ago, but are online now.
But also, keeping them in the loop can help pacify anyone angry or upset.
Apologize continuously, let them know what steps you’re taking to remedy the company’s problem, and thank them for their patience.
When you don’t have any actual news to update them with, it’s best to keep it short and sweet.
If you are providing them with crucial news, it’s best to communicate the essential or most important facts on social, and link to a web page with more information.
When it comes to this, it’s better to over-communicate than not share enough, and this lets you have a central location for the more detailed info.
8. Individually reply to concerned audience members
In addition to sending out blanket statements from your company to its whole audience, you’ll also want to address anyone that reaches out directly on social media.
Obviously, don’t waste your time engaging with trolls and such, but crisis management tools can help you find people who are legitimately concerned, the customers whose relationships you’re in danger of damaging.
If it’s a general angry or concerned tweet, let the user know they’re heard and instruct them on how they can stay updated.
If they address something specific, address that topic directly as best you can.
And if you can’t answer the question, be honest, don’t just try to sidestep it.
And for the love of social media, do NOT use automated or canned responses in a social media crisis.
9. Post a long-form response on your website
Remember that central location I talked about previously? Let’s talk about it a little more.
You want one “hub” that people can go to for information so that you don’t have to only give updates 140 characters at a time.
This can be a blog post that you update as you have more information or a static page.
Add new updates and details as you have them, and it’s a great timeline of the crisis and place to direct social media users to.
You can even embed social media posts to let people see all channels in one spot.
10. Let the dust settle.
Once you’ve performed steps five through nine, it’s kind of a matter of rinsing and repeating. You’ll go through them with each update you communicate to your audience.
Once they’ve done their jobs, it’s time to let the dust settle. Move on, but don’t forget.
You don’t want to keep people’s attention on the social media crisis any longer than it needs to be, but you also shouldn’t avoid the topic if someone else brings it up.
And you’re done
You now have a crisis plan locked, loaded, and ready to test.
Hopefully, you’ll never need to use it. But this way you’re prepared in case disaster strikes.
If you want more information for each step of the way, download our free workbook. It’s a detailed walkthrough to help you ask and answer the right questions.
With it, you’ll be ready to deal with anything coming your way.
