Most of the brands that read this blog will never experience anything even remotely on the level of 1982 Tylenol Cyanide tampering scandal or even the recent Mattel Chinese toy recall of the past summer. That said, crises exist on different levels for different brands. For example, I use the Basecamp software service to help my clients manage the workflow of their blog comments. Since it's a SAAS (software as a service) offering, when it stops working, that's bad.
This past Monday, Basecamp went down for a couple of hours due to a traffic accident (a truck drove into a transformer, causing a "power event" at their main provider's data center in Dallas.) 37Signals copious and immediate response to this incident was totally textbook because they:
- Were totally transparent about what was causing a problem for their customers;
- Responded immediately to the problem;
- Allowed customers to talk back and exchange information and stories with one another, allowing the situation to be personalized, and
- Made sure every single customer knew about this incident by putting it front-and-center in their product and on their website the very next day.
Messages like this one from Dylan, a British Basecamp customer, were typical of the customer responses:
"Shit happens but its the way you deal with it that makes the difference.
I
really respect the way you guys provided a clear, concise reason why it
happened without any blame-mongering or excuses but a commitment to
move forward and get even better,
This is in start [sic.] contrast to several big corporates who have f*ed
up my services lately but tried to pass the buck, not apologise and
generally develop very slopey shoulders when it comes to accountability.
You’ve
turned a potentially damaging incident into something that once again
makes me smile at your level of professionalism compared to the big
guys who are in the stone age when it comes to good service. Well done.
Hope no-one was seriously hurt.
Dylan"
Well, this sounds great and all, but you need to have a toolset in place to do this when shit really
does hit the fan. Outlined below are the social media tools that you'll want have in place in order to take your conventional crisis plan and execute in a social media toolset.
If you can answer the five questions below, then you've got a solid way to do social media outreach in a crisis situation. Stick to the four core plan objectives listed above, once you get these tools in place. They're listed in order of execution. Should a crisis occur, execute in this order.
- Your blog and existing videoblog platforms- Do you have a blog? Do you have a $1000-2000 HD video camera? If not, make one and get one, respectively. Have a blog, if only to give monthly news updates and to save for the crisis that might occur every hundred years or so. I know that certain brands (financial consulting, etc.) may say they have no reason to blog. Well, this is the only reason that holds up against that statement. Twenty-five years ago, Tylenol CEO James Burke had to go on television and news conferences explaining the situation for why his company's product killed seven people and what they were doing about it, but his reach and coverage were at the mercy of the television networks. Today, your brand needn't play by those rules, as long as you're prepared. If you need to, get on YouTube, and explain exactly what is going on, immediately.
- Micro-blogs - Numerous brands have reached out over their
established microblog infrastructure to tell people what was going on
during a crisis. Do you have a Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce platform to do this on?
- Blogger relations - Do you have the phone numbers and emails of
all of the bloggers that are currently writing about your brand? They
won't mind if you wake them up in the middle of the night if they're
your only pipeline to reach out to customers affected by a crisis.
However, this is not an ideal strategy, and should only be used if the first two are unavailable. Do all of your communications people
know how to search within blogs for mentions of your brand's name? You
can't make blog comments if you don't know where the conversation is. Get your team trained.
- Social networks - Are your customers connected to you in the social graph? If you are touching them in social networks, you can message them there, en masse. Only use this kind of in-network email blast in a crisis situation. If you have discreet customer groups within the networks (like Facebook groups), reach out to them, and let them ask questions and answer them publicly.
- Customer email - This is a last resort, but it's still a helluva lot better than saying nothing. Do you have an email list that will allow you to reach all customers, fast?
Tomorrow, we get back to social media assessment metrics and how to sell this stuff to the rest of the company.
Most of the brands that read this blog will never experience anything even remotely on the level of 1982 Tylenol Cyanide tampering scandal or even the recent Mattel Chinese toy recall of the past summer. That said, crises exist on different levels for different brands. For example, I use the Basecamp software service to help my clients manage the workflow of their blog comments. Since it's a SAAS (software as a service) offering, when it stops working, that's bad.
"Shit happens but its the way you deal with it that makes the difference.
Well, this sounds great and all, but you need to have a toolset in place to do this when shit really does hit the fan. Outlined below are the social media tools that you'll want have in place in order to take your conventional crisis plan and execute in a social media toolset.If you can answer the five questions below, then you've got a solid way to do social media outreach in a crisis situation. Stick to the four core plan objectives listed above, once you get these tools in place. They're listed in order of execution. Should a crisis occur, execute in this order.
- Your blog and existing videoblog platforms- Do you have a blog? Do you have a $1000-2000 HD video camera? If not, make one and get one, respectively. Have a blog, if only to give monthly news updates and to save for the crisis that might occur every hundred years or so. I know that certain brands (financial consulting, etc.) may say they have no reason to blog. Well, this is the only reason that holds up against that statement. Twenty-five years ago, Tylenol CEO James Burke had to go on television and news conferences explaining the situation for why his company's product killed seven people and what they were doing about it, but his reach and coverage were at the mercy of the television networks. Today, your brand needn't play by those rules, as long as you're prepared. If you need to, get on YouTube, and explain exactly what is going on, immediately.
- Micro-blogs - Numerous brands have reached out over their
established microblog infrastructure to tell people what was going on
during a crisis. Do you have a Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce platform to do this on?
- Blogger relations - Do you have the phone numbers and emails of
all of the bloggers that are currently writing about your brand? They
won't mind if you wake them up in the middle of the night if they're
your only pipeline to reach out to customers affected by a crisis.
However, this is not an ideal strategy, and should only be used if the first two are unavailable. Do all of your communications people
know how to search within blogs for mentions of your brand's name? You
can't make blog comments if you don't know where the conversation is. Get your team trained.
- Social networks - Are your customers connected to you in the social graph? If you are touching them in social networks, you can message them there, en masse. Only use this kind of in-network email blast in a crisis situation. If you have discreet customer groups within the networks (like Facebook groups), reach out to them, and let them ask questions and answer them publicly.
- Customer email - This is a last resort, but it's still a helluva lot better than saying nothing. Do you have an email list that will allow you to reach all customers, fast?
Tomorrow, we get back to social media assessment metrics and how to sell this stuff to the rest of the company.