Our team will devise a tailor made social media crisis playbook for your brand. This is detailed below. After that, we’ll do training with your team so that everyone is on the same page and feels confident moving forward. This could mean a full day workshop or a series of training sessions depending on the scope and the prior experience of your in-house marketing team. This includes role-playing or running through realistic relevant scenarios and scripts to make sure you’re ready.

As risks and threats change from year to year and staff come and go, we can also help you update your playbook and do retraining each year to make sure you stay prepared.

Before the crisis: Dealing with the key issues and making a plan

The first step is taking a good hard look to get a clear idea of which issues affect your brand the most. After becoming aware of your vulnerabilities, you may be able to address some strongly enough that they’re no longer a threat.

Remember that this examination must include people. Staff are your best resource but also your biggest liability. Employees can often cause a crisis with poor decisions or inappropriate behavior. This needs to be accounted for in your plans. To reduce the chances of these kinds of incidents, it’s crucial to communicate with staff about their role within the organization, expectations for their behavior, standards for decision-making as well as health and safety regulations.

Crisis planning isn’t about making a document. It’s about ensuring that reason rules the day when an emergency occurs and that leadership and processes are clear, even in stressed situations.

Have a plan and know your vulnerabilities.

During the crisis: Making the right calls

It’s important to remember that silence and speed are primary tools when things are unravelling. Think carefully about the words you plan to use and then do it fast. Ideally, you’ll never need to use your pre-written responses but it’s best to have them on file and ready to go just in case. It’s also worth rehearsing to truly understand the calm demeanor and quiet confidence that’s needed in an emergency situation.

And in some cases, it’s just better to say nothing at all.

When you do need to communicate, be as honest and accurate as possible. It helps if a team is established as fact checkers to monitor information on the issue and correct any inaccuracies as fast as possible.

Be confident in your decisions and be prepared to stand behind them. Anticipate reactions and put yourself in other people’s shoes to help understand the issue from various perspectives. Advise management about how their decisions will impact public perceptions.

Don’t be afraid to do things differently and use additional communication strategies like face-to-face meetings, town hall discussions and third party consultations.

And if you’re in novel territory and whatever you’re doing isn’t working, pivot quickly rather than pursuing a failing strategy.

After the crisis: Analyze your performance

If you do a good job, people will think, “They handled that well.”

If you do a great job, people will think, “I didn’t know they had a problem.”

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In an ideal situation, crises are prevented or solved quickly before they can snowball and come to public attention. But no matter what the outcome, use the experience to learn and update your crisis management plans and drills.

What should your plan include

Your plan should incorporate everything you need to address the issue at hand, stop it from growing any bigger and prevent it from becoming a full-blown crisis.

It can include:

• Team roles: Who is responsible for what? Clearly define staff roles and responsibilities to help ensure that nothing is missed and nothing escapes attention. Make sure everyone knows who needs to be informed and if there is an approval process, make sure everyone knows what it is
• Quick response steps: List the steps that should be taken and who is responsible for each action
• Setting up key alerts and early warning processes
• Social media
• Media relations
• Legal, compliance and regulations issues
• Communication templates and drafts: For each crisis scenario you think of, create various templates for different audiences. You can quickly fill in the relevant details and send them through the most appropriate channel such as email, app alerts, your website homepage, social media, press releases, press conferences etc