7 Strategies To Prepare & Prosper In A Global Social Crisis

By Malcolm DeLeo, Chief Evangelist, NetBase

As carefully as you may have built and managed your brand reputation, a crisis can cause it to go south quickly in this age of social media. Crises can now occur in places you don’t expect, and can spin out of control far more quickly than in pre-social media days.

Here’s a social-media-centered process with clear roles and procedures that can help get you through a modern social crisis.

1. Get A Process — Focus less on the tool you use for social media analysis and more on defining a process with clear roles and procedures for your staff and agencies. Use your social media analysis tool as an early warning system to quickly and efficiently gather information about the crisis, analyze it, and proactively respond. 
2. It Takes A Village — Set up a “command center” where you can bring decision-makers together and empower them to reach consensus and make decisions quickly. Make sure the team comprises people experienced in social media, and place your trust in their judgment so you’ll know they’re not overreacting to individual posts or tweets that don’t constitute a crisis.
3. Moments Matter — Find out as much as you can as quickly as you can and use a social tool that updates in real time throughout the crisis. The social conversation, especially on a site like Twitter, changes moment by moment, and the slower you move, the more reactive you become. Being reactive instead of proactive means you’ll be dealing with a bigger crisis than if you’d gotten out in front.
   
4. Understand Accurately In Real Time — Find and use a social media intelligence tool that accurately analyzes the social data it collects. That means the technology should enable you to understand accurately, in real time, what consumers are saying and how your response affects the online conversation. Then you can act on your analyses with confidence and better results.
5. Get Comfortable With Qualitative Analysis — Don’t expect to be able to quantify conclusions and insights from a social media data set during a crisis. By the time you can do that, the target has moved. So get comfortable with acting on the best conclusions you can reach based on an analysis that combines qualitative and quantitative measures. 
6. Look For Real-Time Opportunities — Social intelligence enables you to follow online conversations, know where and why they’re taking place, and identify key  conversation themes. Use these capabilities during a crisis to find and leverage opportunities to promote your brand, like Oreo did with its “Dunk in the Dark” campaign during the Super Bowl power outage.  
7. Think Offense, Not Defense — Crisis management is really about moment-by-moment social awareness. If you’re aware, you can be proactive and not reactive, which equates to thinking about being on offense rather than defense. Accurately understand the social conversation in the moment and you’ll be able to handle any crisis that comes your way—and you’ll find opportunities to build your brand, which are far more common and more valuable than playing defense in a crisis.