Fighting the Urge to Respond: Social Media Crises
When a bad story breaks in the local or national newspaper or on TV, the senior management, especially of a public company, goes into a crisis management mode. Some companies have plans for this. The PR pro’s are called and the story assessed while responses are prepared. A press release might be issued and the CEO or perhaps someone else on the senior management team, makes a statement on behalf of the company. Corporate PR counsel knows the story will most likely fade within 48 hours. The news cycle is fast. This was fine, before the Social Web. Before bloggers and Twitter and…all these new channels of communication. Before technology tools enabled the general public to speak and hold sway.
It is likely now that a blogger will pick up the story and add their two-cents worth. The online version of the newspaper or TV story may have comments enabled – and people are saying what they think. On the one hand, such public commenting can help a PR pro shape a better message for response, and they know this.
More often than not, good public relations counsel are superb, sober second thought. They can be, and should be, the calm in the storm. But a response is usually part of the resolution. Sometimes the response is terse, other times more detailed depending on the level of crisis.
Unfortunately, there is often the desire to respond to bloggers in the Social Web. This knee-jerk reaction however, may be the worst route to take. In the social media crises we’ve handled, it’s usually been the result of the CEO taking a member of the publics comments or blog statements too personally and firing of a response.
It’s easy to do, and self-justify. As a CEO or president of a business or organization, they are passionate about their role and company. A clever blogger knows the buttons to push. It takes a CEO only moments to post their own rebuttal on the bloggers site. That’s when it all falls apart.
Before responding, we advise clients to step back and do some research first. Find out how popular the blogger is, if they have a wide following and if so, could the story take on legs? If a story can spread, even more damage can be done in a matter of a few hours.
Once words are out there now, they cannot be retracted or re-stated. The top recommendation we’ve made to clients when a PR crisis is about to hit the Social Web? Keep the CEO away from Internet access for a while. Let them cool their jets while the strategy is planned. Dealing with the general pubic through Social Media is very different from traditional media.