Crisis Management and Social Media
March 4, 2010We have been discussing many aspects of Crisis Management on this blog, but Dallas Lawrence wrote an article on Mashable about Crisis Survival lessons specific to the Social Media Age.
Information travels quickly these days, especially with the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Not only do companies have to hold press conferences and put the fires out the traditional way, they have the internet to contend with and the rules are not necessarily the same. Social media users want real time responses and updates. As social media experts know, announcements via Twitter or Facebook should also be conversational in tone and encourage discussion among fans. For example, at the time of Toyota’s crisis, their fan page boasted 81,000 fans. Getting to that fan base should have been a no-brainer when crafting their already tardy response. All it would have taken was a sentence or two to let customers know that they were working on the problem.
You can read the article here.