PR and Social Media Crisis Management - Why your brand’s reputation depends on it
Your brand’s reputation depends on your PR and social media crisis management, and here’s why…
Arguably the most important role for a PR and social media agency is to be able to guide their client through a crisis, as few events can impact the reputation and brand confidence more than a PR crisis spinning out of control.
PR crises can be born out of a number of scenarios; from insensitive comments on Twitter, poorly thought out PR campaigns - the Pepsi and Kendall Jenner ad fiasco anyone? - bad behaviour (we’re looking at you Brewdog) to incidents involving serious injury or death.
In 2023, time is moving in the media at a faster pace than ever before, with 24/7 instant news sources and the continuous rise of social media, crises have the potential to strike out of nowhere.
One moment the brand is revered and adored - the next minute the subject of a barrage of online abuse and negative sentiment. Influencer Molly Mae Hague was the adored darling of the social media world, until her appearance on Steven Bartlett’s podcast ‘Diary of a CEO’ in 2021, where she claimed that “we all have the same 24-hours in a day as Beyonce”. This resulted in an almost instant change in online sentiment with calls for her to be ‘cancelled’.
Quite often companies will find themselves blindsided and make the biggest mistake of all - take no action.
Crisis management is a strategy to help brands and organisations to positively turn around a negative event.
With the right team holding your hand, and some advance plans in place, a crisis does not need to mean the end of your reputation. Preparing for the worst case scenario before disaster strikes can indeed equip you with the tools to weather even the worst storms and to reach resolutions without emotion, but in today's fast paced media landscape, we find ourselves having to make decisions in real time.
Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. A good monitoring system should allow you to spot a flurry of activity, which should prompt you to dig a little further into what the sentiment is around your brand. In other words, what are people saying about you online? Most regularly it will come back to a simple matter, such as customer satisfaction which can - more often than not - be nipped in the bud and resolved, but if there is a bigger, more damaging crisis at play then the sooner it is spotted the sooner it can be tackled head on.
Crisis management golden rules:
Form a crisis team in advance - this is made up of all stakeholders, including those who will deal with internal communication. Your entire team must be aligned and all communicating the same messaging.
DO NOT PANIC! It’s a natural reaction but one that can cost reputation and runs the risk of causing inaction.
Tackle the crisis head on - one of the biggest and most damaging mistakes brands can make is staying silent. Today, with so many media outlets, online traditional and social media, response times need to be faster than ever. ‘Let’s ignore it and it will go away’ is not a strategy. Just ask Matt Hancock.
Decide how you will communicate with the media (is this a statement issued wide or a response on social media?) how often (is it one statement issued or is a follow up statement needed) and who the spokesperson will be (is the the face of the brand or the PR representative?).
Track the media coverage and the online mentions - assign a member of the team to solely monitor media mentions, this will very much give you intel into how the crisis strategy is performing (and how much of the reputation has been salvaged).