Keeping Your Mouth Shut In A Social Media Crisis

A co-worker or friend sends you a link to a blog post. Someone’s ranting about your company, or maybe about you. There it is. In digital print. For all the world to see. It’s on the Web. That means at that very moment, thousands upon thousands of eyes are reading it, laughing at you, gloating and preparing witty responses to the comment section. You simply must respond, jump to defend your brand, your personal image…you start to type. Stop. Stop it right now.

I’ve seen this reaction more than a few times in the past year. It usually comes with a phone call or email “I need help” because suddenly, it is a crisis. But if you hadn’t responded, hadn’t typed out that long-winded and certainly well justified response, it wouldn’t have escalated.

This response I think, is an inheritance of the days when all we had really was newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. And if something bad was said about you, then it probably was seen by a lot of people and a response was pretty much a necessity – since you’d likely get a call from a reporter, eager to pour some more wood on the fire.

Yes, anyone can publish anything they want to the Web today in moments. Without fact checking. But that doesn’t mean many have seen that smarmy tidbit of nastiness. In fact, only a few may see it.

So before you’re tempted to start madly typing, stop. It’s time for an assessment. The blogger in question may have little or no audience. The audience they may have may also be sycophants with little further influence. Do some queries on a search engine, see what pops up. Try to assess the circle of influence of the blogger and if the “story” has spread to other Social Media channels or if it may be newsworthy. Call your PR agency or a Social Media research/consulting firm and ask them to take a quick look. You’ll have a response fairly quickly on how to proceed.

But first, assess the story and the spread. If it’s minimal, don’t engage. As soon as you do, you’ve given them power and the cats out of the bag…hissing and ready to go. A whiff of controversy and the story will spread in moments.

Keep in mind, just cause it’s out there, doesn’t mean anyone’s reading it. Millions of blogs rarely get much traffic, ever. The upside may be instant publishing, the downside is it’s also harder to get noticed.

Or what would you recommend?

(Author: Giles Crouch)