Social Media Crises: The Hidden Chatter

When we think of and mostly talk about, Social Media crises, we tend to look at the bigger stories; United Breaks Guitars, Motrin Moms, JetBlue. Let’s face it, they’re juicier and hit a broader audience. These stories bring together traditional and social media. But smaller, mostly “hidden” issues can create PR nightmares for a business.

As we experienced with a client today. For obvious reasons I can’t name them, I like having clients and don’t like making a painful issue worse. The issue didn’t get broadcast across Twitter or Plurk or similar microblogging channel. Nor did it wind it’s away through Facebook.

This crisis took place across three “closed” forums. By “closed” I mean that it was in semi-moderated forums focused to a particular topic/industry. Someone posted a topic in a forum, within a short while, others joined in, discussing a product and their feelings about that product. It started only 3 days ago, but by this morning had reached a significant volume and resulted in a large volume of calls to a contact centre and began migrating up to senior management.

We monitor for this client monthly. Which helped. But the challenge of automated Social Media monitoring tools becomes quickly apparent – most of them are locked out of these forums. And this is a huge gap in Social Media monitoring.

Although this issue was “localized” and didn’t hit broadcast Social Media levels, it still caused a drop in sales in just 2 days of 8% and forced a mid-size business to focus many hours of senior management and people resources to contend with it. Fortunately it was kept localized and didn’t seep over into more public forums.

So what are some take-aways for a situation like this?

1. Don’t rely on Google Alerts or basic monitoring services.

2. Find out where “discussions” are going on in closed forums like newsgroups, chats or discussion forums and check in weekly to see what might be going on.

3. A crisis can occur in Social Media in closed loops and cause as much damage as if it hit the more public forums.

4. Engage in these discussions (be open and disclose who you are, trying to pretend your a customer is dangerous) and stay engaged.

5. Often times, these “hidden” sides of Social Media can be of more value than more public forums.

So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience? What steps do you take in this type of issue?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

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.

Social Media As A Weapon

On the darker side of Social Media, it can effectively be used as a weapon to discredit a competitors product or service. It can be used to discredit a person/celebrity or to even shake up a stock. More importantly, it does not just affect big corporations. Today, Social Media can be used as a competitive weapon to hurt local or regional businesses.

We come into the area of Online Reputation Management here, but from the angle of competitive intent. What is often overlooked, is that sometimes an individual, business or stock is not under attack by a “random blogger” or group of legitimately frustrated consumers. Sometimes the attack is planned and highly coordinated; by a competitor or rival celebrity. It’s an aspect of Social Media that until now, has not been generally discussed. Through our experience however, we know it’s very real. We also predict it will become an element in corporate competitive strategy in the future.

So how come we haven’t heard about it much before? If you’re the company under attack, you may never know it was coordinated, or the way in which an outcome is settled is not one you want to announce publicly. Just dealing with the ensuing crisis is expensive enough in terms of brand reputation, PR costs and stress on internal resources and stakeholder communications. The ability to gather evidence of “where” the issue started or by “whom” can be challenging at best and is murky in legal terms.

Our case was with a petrochemical company (I can’t give any data other than the industry) who faced a sudden upswing in public complaints and was registering increased hostility from consumers and government. The story was close to hitting mainstream media. Instead, quick research was done and the story was countered effectively before it spread across more of the blogosphere or hit traditional media.

So in what way are these attacks occurring and why? A competitor can “plant” information with “apparent” evidence with a series of bloggers known to have the right following, or in bulletin boards used by retail traders, as an example. The story is usually “emotional” in nature, designed just so it will be shared and incite discussion. Then the consumer takes over, adding to and building on the story. The primary objective is to have the “issue” hit traditional media and accelerate it further.

So, why then, and who? Social activist groups are learning the power of targeting companies they feel are committing social wrongs – no surprise there. Competitors can discredit a product on launch to either stop or divert their competitors attention on the product, culling marketing and sales efforts. Damaging a brand via Social Media can result in setting a victim back many months and weakening their market position. There are a number of tools including “splogs” or “Spam Blogs” that can aid in driving a negative attack, seeding misleading messages through anonymous accounts, link spamming and more.

Such actions, if a person, organization or company is caught, can lead to serious litigation, defamation of character and slander suits. Is it happening? yes. What can you do? Certainly a monitoring tool helps, but there are certain indicators that can be analysed to give indicators an attack is not random. Proof can be challenging, but there are ways. Caught quickly, most attacks can be diverted, but monitoring remains an essential element.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)

How Will The Slowdown Impact Social Media?

Will the economic slowdown impact the Social Media space? Certainly. One respected writer, Rafe Needleman has already put his picks in on who might fail in the coming months. There are bound to be failures as investors look for gain, not pain. But is that such a bad thing?

Our initial take at MediaBadger is that as the economy was overheated, many stocks overvalued and the housing market way overvalued, so are many Social Media applications overhyped and underserving. Media channels have become extremely fragmented in the past decade and even more so in the past two years, with the plethora of Web 2.0 applications. There’s just too  many services in certain segments; over 350 blogging services, over 200 social bookmarking applications, over 700 community services, 500+ ecommerce apps and hundreds of fil sharing, video sharing and photo sharing services. Somethings gotta give as they say.

While Web users may have breached 1 Billion, that doesn’t mean all are using or need Social Media tools and services. What we’ll likely see is a culling of services. Some will be bought out at fire sale prices by the larger players, others will just shut down and some will limp along.

We expect that microblogging like Twitter and Plurk (who’s Karma will that hurt?) may suffer sooner, along with video and photo sharing sites that aren’t under the wings of a Yahoo! or Google. Many a Social Media service have been struggling to find their ideal revenue model and falling up short.

An upside for Social Media though is that people tend to “cocoon” in harder economic times; spending more time at home and consuming entertainment media, including the Web. We expect to see a rise in Social Media use (sales of home electronics outpace other consumer products still) as this cocooning occurs. This may help some start-ups on the verge and others that survive to do better than might be expected.

We still don’t know where we’ll end up in terms of recession and for how long, but a culling of Social Media services isn’t so bad. The best will survive and may survive well, marketers will have an easier time reaching their target audiences and consumers will dictate what they want while learning to say “no” to more frivolous services. Either way, the next 12 months will pass quickly and it will be an interesting time.

What do you think will happen?

PR Crises and Social Media; What’s Your Plan?

A bad news story for your company hits traditional media. You kick in the standard damage control processes and try to move beyond the issue; it’s always worked before. Except this time a prominent or even not so prominent blogger picks it up…and it spreads. Have the rules changed? Can you move beyond the story like before?

Certainly, except it may take a little longer than before, and there may be “aftershocks”. When the Blogosphere picks up on a story it can suddenly take on a life of its own. Sometimes there’s no real need to respond, other times you must respond. There are ways to manage a crisis point with Social Media, but the issue can stay hot in the Social Media world a little longer.

In most bad news incidents, the best strategy is to acknowledge the issue, state your proposed resolution and then move on to more positive stories, knowing that in traditional media, the story will blow over fairly quickly. Bloggers and microbloggers however, can add their own opinions and what was a small issue spirals out of control. Not responding can make the perceived issue worse and carry on for weeks or months.

Deciding whether or not to respond is something you need to determine with your PR team or Social Media agency. Deciding how you respond is key, along with follow up. Once you’ve said something in the Social Media sphere, it will live on. This means you may be held accountable at a later date as someone may inquire in a few months to see if you’ve lived up to the proposed solution. If not, you’ll suddenly have another crisis, this is what we call “aftershocks.” Developing a good plan for a PR crisis should always include the Social Media angle today.

With Social Media, the vital point to remember is that a story can live on far longer and resurface at any time. Sometimes you can take the high road and not respond, deflection is still very much possible, but going about it is very different in Social Media.