Hughes blog post: Social media risk management

A few months ago I came across a really useful infographic about Social media triage. Credit to Charlene Li for this one as outlined here.

The first thing outlined in the diagram above is to assess the message. This means that someone has to be monitoring your brand. But are you?Last year, there were many examples of companies that failed to monitor their brand and consequently were unable to react to a crisis in the time that social media users expect. Messages from people using Twitter and Facebook can spread very quickly and their reach can be enormous.Here are some examples of crises that were managed well and not so well via social media.

Good social media responses

• Harvey Norman ran a radio ad about photos with Santa at Christmas with a reference to lap dances. People found this offensive and voiced their opinions in Twitter. Because Harvey Norman were monitoring social media they saw this and the ad ended up being pulled four hours after the first Tweet. Read about it here.
• Two Domino's Pizza employees made a video of themselves doing unsanitary things to food being prepared for customer delivery and posted it to YouTube. Domino's responded with a video of its own. While the Dominos response was good, it was perhaps a bit late.

Not-so-good social media responses

• The A380 Qantas incident left people wondering what was happening when no responses came from Qantas on Twitter. Since then Qantas have stepped up its Twitter presence with a Qantas Airways account although at the time of writing this they are only following 30 people.
• Then there's the Greenpeace vs Nestle incident. Nestle didn't respond well to criticism about their use of palm oil very well on its Facebook page. Greenpeace did very well from the use of social media throughout this, but Nestle did not.

Harvey Norman and Domino's both responded to the criticism positively and relatively quickly. They assessed the message, evaluated the purpose, and fixed what needed to be fixed. In Harvey Norman's case, they took the radio ad off the air. In Domino's case they responded with a video saying that the employees had been dismissed and that this was an isolated incident.Qantas didn't respond at all which just added fuel to the fire and while Nestle did respond, they responded negatively and defensively which impacted their brand negatively in both cases. Qantas should have responded more rapidly (and one would assume the company has put mechanisms in place to do that in future). Nestle shouldn't have deleted Facebook comments or responded defensively to others. It should have used the criticism as feedback about its brand and made appropriate changes - which it eventually did, but not before the damage was done.These case studies show that social media can spiral out of control, but how do you mitigate potential risks?

1. Monitor social media. There are paid tools to do this but there are also free ones, namely: Google Alerts, Social Mention, Twitter search, Booshaka. Setting these up should cover most of your bases.
2. When/if something does happen, take a deep breath, stay calm and respond to it using the social media triage shown above.
3. Are you in the social media space now? If you have a crisis, what social media channels will you use to respond? It's better to have engagement with followers who can become your advocates in a potential crisis rather than scramble to find them if a crisis occurs.
4. Do you have policies in place for social media? If not, it's worth setting some policies up so that employees know how to respond, if they should respond etc. Usually companies have some sort of communications policy or guidelines and the social media component can form part of these.

- Jenny Clift