We live in a culture of nonstop headlines, gossip and scandal – our conversations often fueled by half stories, anonymous statistics and hearsay. These conversations happen quickly and they are powerful; in four to six hours, one well-placed tweet can mobilize consumers against your brand and directly impact your business. From celebrity gossip scandals to automotive safety rumors, this phenomenon is seen time and time again.

There are five components to a crisis management strategy: listening, messaging, influencing, building and buying.

Listening

Your brand’s perceived ethos should be its most protected asset, and social listening and monitoring should be the primary foundation of every crisis management strategy. Negative chatter can have a drastic and measurable impact on almost every element of your organization, including consumer perception, investor relations, employee recruiting, pending litigation – in short, anything that hinges on trust.

 

Without a robust monitoring system, organizations are left guessing. Social listening tools do much more than simply pull comments, wall posts and tweets; they help synthesize the data and evaluate the conversation’s relevance. Despite these tools’ sophisticated capabilities, monitoring still requires experts dedicated to the task.

Peter Mayer is leveraging the next generation of listening tools from Sysomos, which is also being tapped by Toyota, P&G, Nike, Coca-Cola, Nokia, Microsoft, IBM, JWT, Sapient and Publicis, among others. Sysomos’s unique Boolean syntax helps us filter out all of the noise and find the critical conversations right away.

Messaging

Next, every successful crisis management plan needs a playbook. The playbook should be a brain dump of potential crisis situations and corresponding plans to mitigate them. The identified threats will be hypothesized scenarios, each armed with details for response actions, as well as rationale and expected results. The playbook should also include pre-drafted messages – potentially for multiple forms of media – that are ready to publish at a moment’s notice.

 

Influencing

After preparing your counter arguments, you need to identify the people that will help spread your messages. Remember, in a crisis, your credibility has been called into question. You will need to lean on others, with credibility intact, for support. Though influencers range from mommy bloggers to YouTube stars, you should be sure to target these four types:

Diehard Motivators garner thousands of impressions daily and can change the tone of the conversation drastically.

Bandwagon Followers have a smaller fan base but can help activate and mobilize people to rally behind your message.

Message Police will go after untrue or unfairly negative content, working to change perceptions.

Digital Skeptics are convinced only by facts and sound logic; their support is highly valuable but difficult to obtain.

Building

In extreme situations, you will need to ensure that your brand’s perspective is easily accessible and stands out amongst the noise. In advance of a campaign or other situation that might become controversial, consider building a “dark site” that can be made live at a moment’s notice. This site represents the brand’s official stance on an issue and ensures that your voice is present throughout the conversation.

Buying

Paid media should be used to support your influencers and messages and to drive traffic to the dark site. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), specifically, is essential for ensuring that your hard work is visible in search results. Without paid media, people searching for information about the topic are just as likely, if not more likely, to find false and/or slanderous information posted elsewhere.

With preparation, your organization can alleviate anxiety you may have about undertaking a social media campaign or anything else that is outside your brand’s traditional comfort zone. And if the task seems too overwhelming, turn to the news for motivation – a quick scan of the headlines will remind you of all the businesses, governments and individuals that have suffered overnight crises due to lack of preparation.

More than ever, having a crisis management strategy in place is essential for successfully navigating these challenging situations. To help maintain long-term credibility, your brand’s voice must be prepared to quickly respond and influence throughout the conversation.