Social media & public relations: tactical tips for crisis communication – Part 1#
By Craig on Nov 24, 2009 in Communication tactics, Digital communication, Issues & crisis management, Media relations, Social media, Strategic communication | View Comments
There were plenty of tactical, hands-on tips for using social media in a crisis provided at Frocomm’s Crisis Communication & Social Media Summit 2009. Ogilvy’s Brian Giesen, Edleman’s Amanda Little, Howorth’s Graham White, Scaffidi Hugh-Jones’ Rupert Hugh-Jones, SR|7’s James Griffin were amongst the public relations thought leaders and industry heavyweights who participated.
Some of their hands-on tips have been loosely grouped into the following categories:
- Human resources and messaging
- Advertising
- Monitoring
- Tools: engagement and broadcast.
In this post, the first three themes are reviewed, whilst in a following post specific social media tactical tools and tips regarding their use tools will be covered.
There is a truncated version of this post. I thought it worth going into greater detail on the tactical elements the public relations leaders named above shared with all of us. This post is part of an extended series covering the summit. All the coverage is also available in a free PDF report that you are welcome to share with your colleagues and peers.
Human resources and messaging
- Have a non-communication/public relations employee talking to bloggers to optimise the relationship benefits
- Best practice is not to have the media relations person be an organisational media spokesperson. In pressured times like a crisis, the same applies to social media
- There can, of course, be coaching and messaging for an organisation’s social media conversationalist, but there is where social media policies/guidelines come into play
- Crisis situation-specific elements to address in the guidelines include:
- Listen to stakeholders and actually REALLY hear their point of view
- Acknowledge and respect people’s points of view
- Assess whether it is appropriate to ask the person being communicated with to relay to others this new information
- Prioritise influential voices
- Use an ‘authentic’, human voice – as opposed to applying corporate-speak – as social media will not tolerate a faceless, mechanical approach
- Stick to the classic spokesperson approach
- the more senior the better
- the more he or she recognises the issue and concerns the better
- the more human and less air-brushed the better
- the more prepared with messages and trained to speak to media (or through social media) the better
- Ensure that an organisation determines a narrative to the crisis and sticks to it – through the application of consistent messaging – via different mechanisms
- The minimum hours required to adequately manage your social media reputation online is 16 hours per week or 3 and half hours per day
- Those hours aren’t dedicated to a single campaign, but the monitoring and management of your digital footprint alone.
- Once a campaign begins the amount of time spent monitoring, responding and engaging needs to increase rapidly
- HR resource issues should be considered before embarking on a social media campaign. Importantly, the day-to-day monitoring of your online presence is critical
- This is even more imperative for platforms like Twitter where communication is almost instantaneous.
Advertising
- Use keyword advertising to ensure links to organisation-driven information on the topics searched for comes up high in search rankings
- Advertise on blog forums and communities discussing the issue, with links to organisation-driven information.
Monitoring
- Ogilvy’s The Daily Influence can help provide a dashboard for issues monitoring. There are a range of paid and free services to facilitate this occurring, though Amanda Little is an advocate of a customised, paid-for dashboard due to the diversity of information sources that exist on the web. Some options for your arsenal:
- Google alerts
- Tweetdeck
- Radian6
- Other approaches to monitoring include:
- Performing key word searches on social media sites (this helps in the critical step of identifying online brand advocates – and critics – so that strategies can be put in place to leverage/address these people)
- Subscribing to industry-relevant blogs.
What do you think of this advice? What approaches have you taken that can add value to crisis communication using social media tools? Who should be the social media-authorised spokespeople for an organisation, relevant to both whilst in a crisis and when not in a crisis?
This post is part of an extended series covering the summit. All the coverage is also available in a free PDF report that you are welcome to share with your colleagues and peers. As a return favour for providing this resource, and only – of course – if you think the content is worthwhile, perhaps you could tweet about it or flag it on one of your social media networking sites, such as LinkedIn.
