Crisis Management: Not As Easy As All That
April 22nd, 2012
Over on business2community, Melissa Agnes seems to be in crisis mode. The site is packed with tons of new posts from Melissa, including How To Empower Your Employees For A Social Media Crisis, The Makings of a Great Social Media Crisis Plan, part 1: Boingo, The Makings of a Great Social Media Crisis Plan, part 2: The Red Cross, and 25 Tips to Overcoming a Social Media Crisis. There’s a lot of good reading there.
As with so many things, though, from developing marketing plans to customer service issues to — well, pretty much anything else in business (or even life, for that matter), there’s a disconnect between the ideal on paper and real-world reality.
For example, take a look at those 25 tips. Tip 1 is “Speak! Don’t stay silent,” tip 4 is “Respond to each comment and complaint” and tip 11 is “Respond in real-time.” Meanwhile, tips 7 and 8 are “Get all the facts before you release your official statement” and “Release a detailed official statement.”
In larger companies, especially, tips 1, 4 and 11 are in direct conflict with tips 7 and 8. Yes, companies and employees want to respond to each comment and complaint, but in the context of a genuine crisis where every comments page is a minefield of legal issues, every comment is an official statement — and getting all the facts before making an official statement can sometimes be a long and arduous process … which makes that tip 11 pretty difficult to stick to.
Tip 19 raises another interesting issue. It says, “Give your advocates the opportunity to come to your defense.” Which makes sense, of course, but do those advocates understand tip 20, “Know which negative comments are not worth engaging with”? Maybe not, so when those advocates come to your defense, the result might be a pissing contest that does more harm than good. Or consider this: Maybe the very process of giving your advocates the opportunity to come to your defense raises a whole new crisis: “Why does Company X need to have their advocates doing their dirty work for them?!”
I guess my bottom line here is that these sorts of tips and case studies make for interesting reading, but every crisis is completely and utterly unique, and therefore requires a completely and utterly unique set of social media responses on the part of the company. Are there lessons we can learn from Boingo and The Red Cross and others? Sure. But when crisis comes knocking at our own doors, we need to take the unique nature of our business into account while responding in ways that are both appropriate to the dynamics of social media generally, and protective of the unique nature of the business specifically.
Takeaway for marketers: In crisis communications, perhaps more so than any other communications discipline, one size definitely does not fit all.