Serious About Crisis Management? Get Serious About Social Media!
[by Howard Fencl] Here’s another wake-up call – in dollars and cents – for the many Pleistocene-era Luddites in organizations who treat social media as a newfangled afterthought in crisis management: U.S. ad spending on internet platforms will exceed ad buys on broadcast for the first time in 2017, according to a recent PwC report. And by 2020, PwC projects U.S. TV ad spending at $81.7 billion, while internet ad buys are projected to hit $93.5 billion. The biggest jump is expected to come in mobile video ad spending when wireless carriers roll out super-fast 5G networks.
Follow the money. The web is where eyeballs are going. Your brand – and your messages – need to be there, too. In addition, Pew Research Center reports that 66 percent of Facebook users get news on the site, and nearly 60 percent of Twitter users get news on Twitter. A serious and strategic approach to communicating on social media platforms is sound insurance for reputation management when a thorny issue emerges or a crisis breaks.
When you become a target and social media explodes with pile-on invective, be prepared to respond. Here are four best practices to keep in mind:
1. Don’t let mistakes live on.
Respond and correct misinformation in real time. Don’t let misstatements of fact or incorrect characterizations of your organization go unchallenged. Correct the error in a straightforward, professional way. But be sure you are correcting an error of fact. Someone’s opinion of you, no matter how odious, is not an error of fact.
2. Don’t arm wrestle with trolls.
Resist the urge to get caught up in exchanges with rude or obnoxious people on social media. Respond to correct errors, but only once. Don’t feel compelled to continue the conversation should the person then challenge you or your response. There’s not a lot to do in mommy’s basement, so expect the trolls to keep posting until they move on to another issue.
3. Pause before hitting “delete.”
Hold your nose and resist the urge to delete negative postings to your official social media sites unless they are offensive (racial, profane, personal attacks, etc.). If you remove a comment, explain why. Expect, but ignore, the inevitable troll backlash after deleting an item.
4. Remember your audience.
Always remember when responding on social media that you are speaking to the larger audience reading these comments, not just to that specific commenter.