Over at the Crisisblogger blog, Gerald Baron has a great review of Fineman PR's top "PR Blunders" of 2009 and some good insight from Michael Fineman's subsequent interview with Bulldog Reporter where he says that many of this year's missteps revolved around poor utilization and understanding of digital communications. Fineman says the biggest mistake of social media use during a crisis is slow response time. Baron posted the first half of Fineman's response about timeliness on his post. Here's the second half:
In the old days, you had to get on top of a crisis in the first 48 hours. Now, it's the first 48 minutes. In those minutes, you have a responsibility to contain the crisis and alert any audiences that may be in danger or are being impacted by the crisis. Your response must be instantaneous.
He's right. Organizations in crisis often do not have the luxury of waiting even one news cycle to respond. With tens of thousands of tweets per hour, and more than 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it is essential to integrate social media monitoring into the daily intelligence gathering routine, and to ramp up appropriately the moment an issue escalates. A recent survey by the Grocery Manufacturers Association found 54% of CPG companies do not have a program in place to monitor and report on consumer conversations about their companies or brands. Here are a few tips for social media monitoring and for integrating it into a daily program:
- Put them together - If your "social media monitoring guy (or girl)" and your "traditional media monitoring guy" aren't the same guy, put them in the same room during a crisis. What happens online affects what happens offline and vice versa. Allowing both parties to see what's happening outside of their bubble will lead to a faster, more strategic response. The two should also be talking on a daily basis about their analyses when there is no crisis.
- Start from the beginning - If you are not already including social media monitoring in your daily routine, start today by setting up Google Alerts, searching Twitter, using BlogPulse and other free tools while you evaluate which paid service may be right for you. Waiting until a crisis arises to listen to online conversation will put you at a disadvantage - you won't know the influencers and how your brand is usually talked about nearly as well.
- Integrate paid and free services - Don't stop using the free tools once you've signed on to a Radian6 or BuzzMetrics because you can sometimes find gems the big services may look over. Also, read this post by Jason Falls for some more direction.
- Include "problem words" up front - You can't expect to catch every crisis before it starts or know every issue that may arise. However, as in good crisis preparedness, you can anticipate your most likely issues and include keywords for them in your daily searches. Issues with liability? Are there certain buzzwords people use when talking only about issues within your industry? Include the most likely terms in your monitoring program.
- Keep revising, keep refining - Conversation and issues online are fluid. Even if you aren't in the midst of a crisis, the terminology used in online dialogue about your brand, service or industry will change over time. Update your keywords, watchlists and other tools often to keep up with the conversation. Change terms as you see the conversation change, but also schedule regular intervals (Quarterly? Monthly?) to check in on what you're seeing and make any necessary updates.
This is a brief list for now. If you have any suggestions or want to share things that have worked for you, please feel free to comment.
