Five Ways to Avoid the $10,000 Tweet

“We don’t need to respond.”

“They’re just a troll.”

“They’re not an influencer. They’re nobody.”

“If we wait long enough, it will all die down eventually.”

“Why don’t they call customer service like they are supposed to?”

“We don’t monitor that channel regularly so sometimes we miss things.”

Sound familiar? Have you or someone in your company ever said one of these phrases or something like them?

These kinds of expressions are indicative of the mindsets that some companies have when it comes to dealing with stakeholders via social media.

I say “stakeholder” because they could be a current or potential customer, a partner, a friend, an employee, an influencer, or an advocate.

Increasingly, stakeholders are engaging with companies via social media and expect the same in return.

Sometimes those stakeholders are using social media to reach out to organizations for information, support, or, increasingly, to raise an issue in the hopes that publicly outing a company using social media will generate a crisis of sufficient proportions to garner a response.

Often times during such social media crises, internal operations come to a screeching halt.

Key staff get caught up in a flurry of emails, and possibly phone calls, trying to get a handle on the seriousness of the situation, potential actions to take, who needs to be informed or involved, who needs to act, and ultimately confirming who has the authority to approve what action is taken.

That sounds like an organized process, but in reality it can be absolute chaos. People get stressed as they watch the situation escalate and they worry that it will spiral out of control.

Without a predefined approach, organizations can waste time, resources, and cycles unnecessarily. Time and resources come at a cost. It is not unusual for organizations to involve people from key internal areas as well as outside advisors such as lawyers or consultants.

When you tally up the cost for all involved, it can easily climb into the thousands of dollars for the development of a response in the form of a tweet, a Facebook post, a video response, or a series of some or all of them.

How do organizations ensure that they don’t succumb to the chaos? How can they reduce the number of people that need to be involved? How can they empower the right people to handle the situation through to resolution?

Well, the following should provide some answers to those questions. Here are five ways that can help organizations take a proactive approach to social media crises and reputational management.

Monitor

Many brands and organizations are monitoring social media in order to gauge sentiment, find influencers, and manage their reputation. Monitoring is critical to identifying the who, the what, and the where of emerging issues. Early detection helps avoid issues getting out of hand and may allow for quick resolution.

On the positive side, monitoring can also help illuminate your advocates, supportive community members, and even potential customers who have expressed interest in your product or service or more direct purchasing intentions in social media.

Governance

According to Wikipedia:

Governance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance.

This sounds like a more serious word than may be necessary, but it is still the right word to use when it comes to social media. Well developed and articulated social media policies and guidelines will also go a long way in supporting governance.

As organizations expand their use of social media, it is critical that they develop a governance model for social media oversight and decision-making. Roles, responsibilities, and authority must be defined, clarified, and communicated—maybe even over-communicated.

The better people know their roles and responsibilities, the better the process will flow. Over time, the effectiveness of the model must be regularly reviewed and adjusted if necessary.

Review

As a crisis presents itself, staff need to have the aforementioned process in place to deal with it. The Altimeter Group talked about a triage approach to a social media crisis where a number of related variables are considered, such as the source, the validity of what is being said, potential actions that could be considered, and the risks if no action is taken.

Once the review is completed and a plan of action is chosen, then everyone will know what is going to happen and what their role will be.

Prepare

Every situation will be different to some degree, but that does not mean that you can’t prepare in advance.

Document and publish your policies and procedures so that everyone is on the same page in terms of the organization’s stance on particular issues and predefined escalation procedures.

Run a few fire drills or scenario planning sessions to help anticipate potential issues and devise potential responses to avoid delays in the midst of a real crisis. Regularly test your preparedness to ensure that something has not been overlooked.

Process

Map the process from monitoring, issue identification, routing to or notification of predefined staff members, decision flow for determining what type of response, if any, to make.

Identify escalation procedures where necessary, defined approval/veto power, and continue to monitor any issues to ensure the response has successfully resolved the it or to see if the issue resurfaces.

Make sure to properly communicate the process to all stakeholders. In fact, some aspects of your process can even be shared publicly through your social media channels.

It doesn’t hurt to explain to your community how your social media accounts are run and what kind of interaction they can expect. For example, if an account or accounts are used for client care or technical support, then the hours of operations and expected response times should be published and regularly posted.

A well-informed community member is a happy one. Furthermore, proactively informing your community will actually lower the likelihood of an issue being escalated.

Those are my five suggestions for avoiding the $10,000 tweet and other social media crisis management issues, but I would love to hear from folks in the social media trenches.

What are your thoughts? What approaches have you taken? What has worked and what hasn’t?