5 Tips to Manage a Social

Media Crisis

Photo Credit: Flickr star5112

What do disgruntled

employees, hackers, and

misguided social media

managers all have in

common?

The ability to tarnish your

company’s reputation with

a single erroneous, ill-

timed, or malicious status

update on one of your

social channels .

Whether a PR crisis stems from an honest mistake or a deliberate attempt to

draw negative attention to your brand, here’s what to do when a social media

update draws the wrong kind of attention from your fans and followers.

1. Address the situation immediately.

It’s tempting to spend a lots of time consulting team members,

management, and perhaps even attorneys before tackling the problem, so

you don’t make it worse.

However, it only takes minutes for social media missteps to go

viral so don’t wait too long before acknowledging the issue.

Immediately

post a message

letting followers

know you’re

looking into the

issue and will

have an update

shortly.

Follow

Through

Simply delete

the offending

message, issue

a brief apology

on the platform

where it ran,

and leave it at

that.

For Minor

infractions

For major

infractions

Issues may

require a formal

press release or

more detailed

media response.

Photo Credit: Pixbay.com/open credits

2. Apologize, don’t make excuses.

Customers expect companies to

own up to their mistakes, not

point fingers or dodge blame.

Now is not the time to talk

about how your IT team didn’t

set up strong passwords or that

your HR department didn’t

revoke account access before

terminating someone’s

employment.

Photo Credit: Pixbay.com/geralt

It doesn’t matter why your

account was compromised;

most followers will hold you

accountable at any cost.

ApologizeAccept blame

Let customers know you’re

taking care of the issue.

3. Just the facts, ma’am.

When mitigating a reputation crisis it’s best to say

only as much as necessary.

• Leave out any frivolous information.

It’s fine to share basic facts like, “Our account was hacked by someone

outside the organization.”

• Do not share your opinion on whether you think the

criticism you’re receiving is warranted.

If you’ve offended your customer base, you need to make it right or be

prepared to have no customers at all.

• More details aren’t always necessary.

Photo Credit: Flickr.com/franko_44

4. Deleted but not forgotten.

Speaking of deleting messages, you can erase updates from your social

media timelines but don’t assume someone hasn’t already taken a

screenshot or that it’s not still lingering somewhere in a third-party

application like Hootsuite waiting to be discovered by one of your

followers.

Remember this if you’re tempted to

fudge facts when crafting damage

control messages.

The only thing worse than

accidentally posting an offensive

message is lying about it later.

5. Don’t hide from critics.

After suffering an embarrassing social

media blunder it’s tempting to issue an

apology and pretend it never happened.

While you don’t want to continually revisit the

unpleasantness for weeks, do take the time to answer

at least some of the individual fans and followers who

take you to task online.

Personal and heartfelt responses go a long way

toward smoothing ruffled feathers.

Don’t simply cut and paste the same response to each person!

Photo Credit: Pixbay.com/irohner

Shortcuts make you look like inauthentic.

In a perfect world, social media engagement would be a

flawless task where nothing ever goes wrong.

People do make mistakes though, so it’s important to

have a plan in place to quickly deal with a worst case

scenario before it gets out of hand.