This week many homes around the country celeb rated the Thanksgiving
Day Holiday. Families gathered to enjoy
home cooked food, catch up with other family members, and probably spend some money during the the busiest shopping day
of the year, Black Friday. Many stores
opened on Thanksgiving Day offering special deals to those early bird shoppers,
other stores decided to have traditional Black Friday shopping hours, opening
early in the morning on Friday. Thanks
to smartphones and social media there are hundreds of videos of people going a
little too far during their Black Friday shopping. In many videos
you see people scrambling for the “hot buys” and door busters. In a video this
year, you see a woman snatching an item that a young child was holding during a
Black Friday shopping spree. Imagine you’re a communication professional for
one of those retailers and as your team monitors your social media presence a
movement begins against Black Friday shopping. It starts with the video on
YouTube and the comments quickly begin to mount. Then a hashtag on Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram is started and the conversation quickly builds with
anti-Black Friday slogan. Are you ready
to handle a social media crisis? Are your
crisis communication and reputation management plans ready to dust off the shelves
and put into effect?
Let’s look at a few ways to make sure you are prepared to
handle a crisis communication situation.
In Young and Flowers (2012) analysis of the 2009 Domino’s
Pizza social media crisis where two employees defaced several sandwiches and
pizza, they site the power of YouTube, “Burgess and Green
(2009) explain that
YouTube users engage
with this medium “as
if it is
a space specifically
designed for them
and that should therefore serve
their own particular
interests” (p. vii).
This can have enormous
positive or negative
impacts for organizations
involved in crisis management, including
but not limited
to the inability
of boundary spanners to
monitor the vastness
of this space;
malicious users who
might create a crisis; and the leveraging capabilities of this platform
to enhance a brand during a
crisis. Meaning that YouTube has
the power to create a crisis and, when used appropriately, manage a brands
reputation during the crisis.
Similarly, The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) used a
similar approach during the outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus. Though the crisis
was not created through social media, the CDC utilized the medium to
communicate to the general public to warn and educate about the spread of the virus
(Walton, Seitz, Ragsdale, 2012).
What any good strategic communicator should tell you is the
need, better yet, requirement, of creating a crisis communication plan as the
first step. Neil Chapman, who worked with BP during their gulf spill, said in a
YouTube interview that
the oil and gas industry is continually holding crisis drills to ensure all
levels of the company are prepared for the inevitable crisis. And for those
reading who think a crisis will not happen to their company, you are mistaken.
It is only a matter of time. I don’t mean to be cliché, but it’s not if, it’s
when. You cannot plan for every single crisis situation, but to create a plan
with clear communication lines, understanding who is making the decisions
during the crisis, who is the spokesperson, are there multiple? In the case of
the BP spill, Chapman explains that all the talking points went out to every
single employee, because reporters were coming up to employees on the beaches
during the clean up process and asking questions on the spot. Instead of limiting
them to canned responses and referring back to a communications professional,
BP utilized its employees to reinforce the message of what the company was
doing to fix the problem that was created.
As social media and mobile technology continues to engulf
the majority of adults, planning to respond to a crisis born on social media
requires planning as well and the leadership to guide the process.
In Wooten and James (2008) analysis of linking crisis
communication and leadership they share the important of planning as a
precursor to responding to a crisis situation, “As business environments change
and grow increasingly complex, it is particularly important that leaders
develop a set of skills that will help them prevent and effectively respond to
crisis and other strategic issues (Garcia, 2006; Mitroff, 2005).”
In an article in The
Wall Street Journal by former CEO of Medtronic, Bill George, he describes
several lessons on how to be a leader during a crisis. In his sixth lesson,
George says to “Never waste a good crisis.” He suggests that when things are
going well within a business it is much harder to usher in change. A crisis allows a leader to bring about
change, with the added benefit that the implementation process is generally
faster during a crisis.
Analyzing the situation when a crisis breaks is important,
to verify if the crisis is legitimate is key to determine if crisis protocol
needs to be implemented. As in Domino’s Pizza crisis, when the YouTube video
sprang up, restaurant officials waited 24 hours before responding. The reason
was to evaluate if the video was real. They went through the evaluation process
with two objective watchdog groups who helped confirm the situation and bring
it Domino’s attention (Walton, Seitz and Ragsdale, 2012). To me, in the social
media age we live in, stakeholders demand a quick response to situations. There
is a fine line that has to be walked when evaluating a crisis and responding.
The question is do you loose valuable response time while evaluating a crisis.
Working with your crisis communication leadership team, you will need to make
the best decision for the current situation.
So with a little more knowledge about crisis communication,
will you work with your organization to create a plan to prepare?
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