125: Build an Indestructible Social Media Crisis Plan in 3 Easy Steps

There are social media fails, the one off posts that can cause a problem. And then there's the social media crisis that causes a huge problem. The fast food chain Burger King has found itself in the center of a storm after the company tweeted, quote, women belong in the kitchen from one of its Twitter handles on Monday. Breaking news right now. Miami Heat player under fire for using anti Semitic slur while playing a video game and the recording of it has has gone viral. Everybody knows that I was the former editor in chief of Teen Vogue, okay? So I have to put that out there. That aside, it doesn't matter. Her tweets and the sentiments behind them were racist and abhorrent and indefensible. Period. Welcome to the Confident Communications podcast where we help communicators create the right response at the right time and deliberate in the right place. In this episode I'll share advice for how to create an indestructible social media crisis plan for your business in three easy steps. All right, how to go about preventing a social media crisis. This is the first episode of a two part series on using social media for pr. My bailiwick. So by definition, there is no definition for a social media crisis. A social media crisis typically is a crisis brought on by a social miscommunication or misfire. This is where you read the articles about the top social media fails of the year. It's usually an awkwardly written post that might offend people or have a lack of common sense behind it, or an intentional post that was one part careless and one part inconsiderate. For example, last week's Burger King UK's women belong in the kitchen tweet. This was Burger King's attempt to highlight gender disparity in the restaurant industry. So they created this provocative tweet that most certainly backfired. It certainly should have backfired because it seemed awfully intentional to me. So they posted it last Monday, which was International Women's Day. And the tweet, if you saw it, there was just one tweet at first that said women belong in the kitchen. And then there was a series of subsequent threaded tweets. That's when you can add a tweet onto original tweet where Burger King pointed out the lack of female chefs in the restaurant business. It's important to point out too that this is Burger King, not us, but in the uk. And I'm sure someone at the head of Burger King Us was thinking, oh, great way to tie us into your social media crisis. But it was a social Media fail that was on the cusp of being a full blown crisis, in part because these kinds of boneheaded clickbait types of posts are suspect. Like people question, at least I did. Is it just a publicity stunt? Is it just for eyeballs? Is it just for clicks? Or is it just bad social media management? Now, that tweet happened to be made a little worse because they initially tried to defend the tweet when people started calling out. And so they replied to users and one user had said the tweet was weird and the response was, we think it's weird that women make up only 20% of chefs in the UK restaurant industry. Thankfully, they deleted that tweet and then they apologize. But when we think again to the typical social media fail, you would have to go back a number of years because we don't have these types of fails around that much anymore. If you remember in 2017, Adidas, or as we say it around the house, Adidas was tweeted a post celebrating the runners who completed the Boston Marathon. Their tweet was, congrats, you survived the Boston Marathon. This was an incredibly insensitive post in light of the Boston marathon bombing of 2013, which, by the way, I totally remember it. It was like it was yesterday. I was in my kitchen watching it live and noted at the time when it happened was similar to the time when I ran the Boston Marathon in 1999 as a bandit. But you know, watching that, that explosion and that bomb happen at that time, I mean, it's still affects me to this day. Which also adds to the severity of why that was such a bad social media post and how these social media fails can go so bad so quickly. Another example of a classic social media fail. If you're a big Star wars fan, you may have remembered this Cinnabon did a posted a tweet when Carrie Fisher died. Princess Leia. And it was a photo of Princess Leia with the Cinnabon wearing the Cinnabums. The Cinnabums, the Cinnabon. And it said, rip, rest in peace, Carrie Fisher, you'll always have the best buns in the galaxy. Yeah, no, see, and then everyone hates on it and then it becomes a social media fail. So, you know, a lot of people, communicators may consider these posts, these social media fails, a social media crisis. But true communicators or true crisis communicators know that social media fail is much different than a full blown crisis, okay? And a full blown crisis can certainly be triggered by a poorly timed Or a poorly written social media post, like in the case of the Burger King UK tweet, which was just on the cusp. But a social media crisis, by my definition is something that's far more damaging. It's the crisis that originates or festers or is fueled by social media. It's when social media contributes to the crisis and amplifies it. And it's far more damaging than the one off social media fail. So there are different types of responsibility when it comes to a crisis. If you listen to this, you know where my angle is when it comes to crisis. That there isn't just one crisis. It's how you react to the crisis at hand which defines what that crisis is. Now, how I look at a crisis, I define them by categories. This goes back to my FEMA days. I connect it to hurricanes, if you will. A category one crisis, a cat one crisis that is one that has minimal responsibility. It's when an event happens where it's out of your hands like a natural disaster, something that I would work on when I was at fema. Or it could be workplace violence or some type of accident, you know, something that is happening that impacts your business, it's still a crisis for you, but your responsibility is minimal. Category two that has partial responsibility. These you'll find the technical errors. So for example, like a plane crash due to a faulty engine, if you worked for the airline, you would have partial responsibility for it. So that would be a large scale example. A smaller scale example might be an outbreak of COVID at a nursing home that you manage or you own, for instance. So that'd be a category two, a category three, which is the space I spend a lot of time in. This is the higher the responsibility. It's when the circumstances are in your hands, the responsibility is from you. It's human error, it's misconduct, it's employees, it's leadership knowingly violating a policy or law. Examples of Cat 3 crises. Well, in the intro, the NBA fined a Miami Heat player $50,000, suspended him from all team activities for a week after he used an anti Semitic slur that was heard on a video game live stream. Now is a video game livestream. Social media. We don't think of it typically as social media. However, it's digital and it is a digital channel where someone can communicate and have conversation. And it happened on a live stream. It was captured and then it was shared. So it became a crisis that lived on online media and social media. Another example from the open Teen Vogue's new editor, former political reporter Alexi McCammond. She had to apologize twice for past racist tweets after the staff at Teen vo, Conde Nast and advertisers complained. All of this happened last week. So these are both recent examples that seriously impacted the reputation of the people involved as well as the team or the publishers, you know, the company, the brand that hired them. Both are examples of a crisis that happened on a digital or social platform and they accelerated and were amplified by a social platform. So in this episode, how to build an Indestructible Social Media Crisis plan for this Cat 3 type of a Crisis now, before we get into the plan itself, I want to give you a sneak peek into two projects that will be released in the upcoming weeks. One. Finally, my book. Finally I sound like Oprah there. That's my attempt to be at Oprah, my book. So I've been working on it for the past year and you know, there's really no better time to write a book than during a pandemic, especially when it's a book about crisis. But in the book it's called Indestructible Leader. Reclaim control and respond with confidence in a media crisis. In this book you will learn how to display truth and transparency online in a time of outrage. Also, you'll get practical tips on how to share your ideas and your brand on social media. You'll discover proactive ways to engage in online forums to enhance your reputation and it will help you become a modern age communicator and one who avoids a reputational crisis. Indestructible Leader is perfect for anybody who runs a business or communicates on the behalf of one who who wants to increase the value and reputation of the business. So the book is coming soon. It's in the hands of the publisher now. I can't wait. So keep listening to upcoming podcasts for my special presale offering on the book for anyone who wants to purchase it in advance. Also arriving soon, the Indestructible PR Masterclass and Blueprint. So it's my online offering for how to create an indestructible reputation in the age of social media. I've created online first of all, not I, we, my team have created online modules that walk you through what you need to have when you are dealing or preparing for a crisis. So you'll get the full set of resources for creating that indestructible PR presence at your company or organization. This all started as the COVID 19 response kit. You may have remembered a year ago as I record that this week that I was preparing to launch the COVID 19 response kit. And so when I launched it in those initial weeks of the pandemic, it was at a time when I essentially lost all my business. All my bookings were gone in a matter of days. So I was faced with a crisis. So instead of panicking, I just made a plan. And that plan was to upload the resources that I had for free. And when I did this, a community was born of other communicators who were all looking for the same thing, resources, guidance, directions, and also just a community of other like minded communicators. And I connected with so many of them in the first few months and I saw this demand for a community and a community in need of content to help communicators feel more valued, more validated in the strong, important work that we do. So we've been working on this for the past year to try and bring together the best resources to help you the communicator. If you are struggling with getting the buy in that you need at your organization or getting the resources that you need, you may need more people there. You might be a one person shop. Look at the indestructible PR masterclass as your coworker. So if you're a solo communicator head of that one person shop, this masterclass in Blueprint can help you. It can help you in the short term, it can help you for decades. So you want to check out the masterclass when it is ready to be launched, which is soon. All right, back to last week and the idea for this podcast, if you remember the podcast two episodes ago in episode 123 where I talked about how to spot the guilty culprit from this type of media response. The tells from Ted Cruz to Andrew Cuomo and I discussed the, the baiting technique, the blaming excuse that people will use in the media. And I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak on a local television newscast. My thanks to Greg Floyd. He's the anchor, the Evening anchor of CBS 6 in Albany, New York. And they were working on a story about Governor Cuomo. And he had asked me to discuss my thoughts on the Cuomo crisis at the moment for his television broadcasting was picked up by Sinclair stations around the country. And it was a great opportunity to get my message out, but also to think about the response. And again, like the Andrew Cuomo crisis is not a crisis that started on social media, but it is accelerated on social media. If you go to Twitter and you just type in the word Cuomo and you can see all of the tweets which for the most part call for his resignation for sexual harassment. I think the number is up to 30 right now. When this broadcast airs, when this podcast airs, my gut is he's still going to be hanging on because he's just going to go down swinging. But this type of leadership crisis is made worse by social media. So now let's dive into the social media crisis and how you can manage it. So this is a two part series. It's pulled from the Indestructible PR Masterclass and the Blueprint for how to prevent and need be handle a social media Crisis. Next week on the podcast, I'm going to talk about how to use social media as a public relations tool. Both episodes offer proven steps and tips gleamed from my research or my work with clients. So I don't only talk about it and research it. I do it and I make sure that it works. All right, so let's do it. How to build an indestructible Social media crisis plan in three steps. So this is my blueprint for how to prepare for that social media crisis so there isn't any further damage to your reputation. All right, step one is probe. Probe is just a great word, but really what probe means is research. Research, probing, discovery, whatever you call it. All good communication plans start with it. Okay, so probing is that aggressive research. That's why I use the word probe. Because when you're dealing with a social media crisis or planning for one or preparing for one, you want to have your probing skills finely honed. Okay, so you must have a system in place to monitor conversations. It's called social listening. Someone on your team must have access to the ongoing chatter and initiatives of people or groups who are commenting about your organization online or if they're organizing against your organization online. Research is gold. With it, you can determine your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, and most important, your threats. So what are some of the probing tactics that you can use? 1. Set up a Google alert. Use all the names in leadership in your organization, the company name. Add names from groups or organizations that target businesses like. Like yours. Now, when I, when I speak about groups, what I'm talking about is stakeholder activism. It's when people act as activists about an issue and they target your organization. Okay, it could be environmentalists, it could be animal rights, it could be women's rights. It could be any type of group that may be targeting you. And you could be ancillary. You could just be a greater part of the organization or they could be targeting you directly. If you have a Google alert for any one of those names on there, it will end up in your email box. Social media crises, they tend to happen on Twitter and Facebook. As I've mentioned before, Twitter, your external stakeholders who live on Twitter are typically the press and also organizations. You're going to have your state, local, federal officials, organizations, groups like to collect there. Certainly your customers, your consumers are going to be there, they're going to use Twitter, but that's not where they're going to congregate, if you know what I, if you know what I mean. Twitter's like more for the bigger stakeholders. Facebook is primarily for your customer, your members, your community, your local or greater community. So you want to keep monitoring Facebook as best you can. And again, that term is called social listening. So make sure you have a social listening system within your organization. Now, monitoring should be handled internally. This is my opinion here and this is from my experience and my research. I don't like outsourcing monitoring unless it's for customer service. So it's fine to have a CRM tool that works with your customers and handles the complaints. If you're a bigger organization and you have some type of CRM, that's fine. But that customer relationship mechanism should be as internal as you can make it because complaints may just start off as complaints, but they can lead quickly to a crisis. So if you have the history of your customers exchange to manage the response, you're going to be better prepared to handle it because you'll see all of it. Hiring a third party firm to sit on your Facebook page, for instance, like, I don't like it. And you know what, either does Facebook, which is a significant reason why you should keep this task native. Now there's a lot of back and forth about the Facebook algorithm punishing brands for using third party applications. If you go online and you were to Google, does Facebook punish third party apps? You're going to see a lot, a lot of blog posts, but they're all from third party apps telling you that no, Facebook doesn't punish you at all. Now me, I just don't believe it. I attended Social Media marketing world in 2019 and the information I was hearing from the sessions I attended was that Facebook was very much about the organic user, someone sitting in the building within the organization, posting organically. I mean, certainly this doesn't mean that you can't use a social media dashboard, a third party app. It doesn't mean that you can't hire, you know, someone else to do it. But I'll just say as a. This is completely anecdotal, but I am acting as an administrator on some Facebook pages right now. I also do it as a volunteer. I'm on a board for my daughter's college and. But for the companies who I work for, who are nowhere near where I live. Just this last week, I could not post an event. I could not do it. I couldn't do it on my phone, I couldn't do it on my computer. I couldn't do it on my laptop. I updated my computer. I did everything and I couldn't post it. And I had to ask someone within the organization to do it. And then I went in and changed it. Again, it's anecdotal. So don't take this as gospel, but take it from someone who just inside of me. I feel like the more native, the better. The last reason why you don't want to outsource is because you're relying on other people unfamiliar with your customer base to spot the red flags. Now, big complaints, they're easy to spot. You know, someone replies on Facebook, you're not doing this or your rates are so high, blah, blah, blah. Anyone can read those tones and say, hey, this is a problem. You know, this is a conversation that could lead to problems. And they could answer and they could pull from a template and. And answer that question. But the true strength in having the Facebook replies be native is you can spot a crisis on the horizon a lot farther on that horizon if you already work with that organization, if you are deeply, deeply embedded in that organization and you know what to spot for. So you don't want to leave that type of work in the hands of a 247 crew that's monitoring for you because they may not stop it and they may not spot it. All right, next, it's important to know thy enemy when you are on your page a lot. Again, this is a reason why you want to have it inside the house. You are going to research people and you're going to research groups that are likely to cause a crisis for your organization. Now, another word that we use in crisis communication management is called stalking. And people are very, very good at being able to stalk people on social media. Now, of course, when you do a lot of programs leave digital breadcrumbs. It happens, okay? But stalking is a necessary task when it comes to finding out information about groups, especially groups that may be targeting you. I will fully admit that I ask for access into these types of activist or, you know, angry consumer driven groups when I can. And if I don't have access or the client who I'm working with doesn't have access, then we just go around and ask people, do you know someone in there? Are you in there because you want to get the information if you can, because that's the only way you can plan for it, if you know what they're talking about. So by all means, peek around where you can Google people, do a deep search on people. I have a lot of tools that I use. It's going to be a future podcast episode. Some of my stalking tools are not typical ones that people wouldn't use. I use a lot of the same tools that journalists use. So look for that in an upcoming podcast. But it's called, it's, you know, it's a little dark arts pr, but you definitely want to do it, especially if you have some rabble rousers out there who are always chattering and can create a lot of problems. Okay, so that is step one, which is all about the research and we're going to call it the probe. It's important to have the probing down. If you don't have it, you're going to be caught unaware when a crisis happens. All right, the next step, of course, it's obvious you can pick this P in alliteration, it's plan. Now, right off the bat, if you have a crisis communication toolkit that was written before 2020, toss it. Well, don't toss it, read it, update it. But you're probably going to have to update the entire thing because any toolkit written before 2019 is not going to be a toolkit that would be adequate for 2021. It needs a serious update. Something that your crisis communication toolkit or plan should have is some type of decision tree. What happens when triggers, who talks to whom and what happens? And who contacts whom. This decision tree might change. But I will tell you, the two parts of the tree that will be connected directly is the communicator. The person who's responsible for the social media channel should have direct access all the way to the top of the tree. Whichever leaf is sitting at the top of the tree, if it's the CEO, if it's the owner, if it's the president or the general manager, if there is something happening on social media, they should have immediate access to you. So we're talking phone numbers, cell phone, emails, text, hey, I need an answer. This is what's happening right now. That's the type of relationship that I have right now on the Social media channels that I'm managing for clients. When I see something zoop, I send it right off to the CEO so they can see exactly what is brewing and they can decide how they're going to manage it. Now, not all crises or not all events that happen on social media or conversation requires the same type of response. Again, a reason for having all your social media in house is because the more crises, the more events, the more issues that your comms team sees, the quicker they're going to be able to respond respond to it and the more confident they're going to be to respond to it. I know this firsthand from communicators especially I'll say the communication specialist level who are now managing Facebook. Their fear is not how do I create a post or what am I going to post this week. That's the fear of people my age, like what am I going to talk about right now? Thank goodness I don't do social media anymore. But their biggest fear is what happens if a crisis happens on my watch? What happens if someone starts complaining, like really complaining, and then they start sharing? That's where the nerves start to bubble. So that's why that communication specialist, that PR manager needs to have direct access to someone at the top, so they know precisely what they need to respond to. Especially if it's a bigger issue, because we want to quell it right away. So make certain that your social media admins or anyone in customer service or member services has detailed up to date contact information for everyone in leadership. There should also be pre approved messaging templates at the ready. And this isn't just for social media and just for communicators. It should be for people who work in billing. It should be for people who work in departments that handle angry customers. Whatever they are saying to a customer on the phone should be said to a customer on social media. You are stopping a crisis. And a social media crisis can start on a phone just as easily as it can start on social media. So a good communication planning tip is to have pre approved messaging, have these templates out for everyone to use. And lastly, the person responding directly online needs to have the authority to do so. They need to be able to keep having dialogue, those conversations with people to be able to satisfy that customer. Sometimes the goal is only to make sure they're not angry. It's not to change their mind. It's important to know that it's not their job. Replying on Facebook that I'm going to change your mind or I'm going to tell you that you're wrong. We don't want to do that. It's providing as much information as you possibly can to satisfy them. The goal, how I look at it, or I should say the objective, the short term goal is to manage the expectation. Sometimes it's an unsatisfactory yes. Like okay, thank you for answering the question. They may not be totally satisfied, but you got to a yes. All right. That was step two was the planning. All right, step three. This is the most important step. It's predicting the response. There's some critical thinking involved in this step, some real savvy communication work. So this is the part of the pre crisis work. So you want to have all of your available communication channels fully manned and ready for a crisis. You need to have access to websites, the passwords need to be known. There has to be a person who can make an immediate post when something happens. And it's also good to have a person who can write a response. I may have mentioned it on the podcast. I feel like I have. I've mentioned the story out loud that one night I was out walking my dog in a rush because I had to come back and make dinner quickly. But the sun was setting, you know, winter New England and I got a panic phone call. I need a response. I have a big blow up on social media. It was a classic social media crisis and they needed a response but they wanted someone to write it because it was a sticky issue. So it's good to have all of those abilities and skills again in house if you can. And if not, that's why you have people like me who are out there who can write them for you. Now when you are dealing with with a Category 1 response. Remember think Cat 1 hurricane. This is when your company or your organization has a minimal responsibility. They are the ancillary part of a bigger crisis or event or natural disaster that's happening. When this happens, you want to use every communication channel at your disposal. So you want to post media statements, press releases online, then share them to social. You want to reach reporters directly with the updates using Twitter, Facebook, any channel to get necessary information to your stakeholders. So what this means for planning for a crisis is that Category 1 response you may not know what it is. A few weeks ago I did a podcast on the winter storms in Texas and I was talking about industries that provide basic needs, electricity, water, heat, Internet. You know, the things that people need for day to day. They were impacted by that storm, but they needed to reach all of their customers. So plan for an event Like a Cat one event. And that's when you have to have all of your channels open. If you fall down on any of those areas or in your communications, as I noticed in that podcast, which I'll put in an episode in the show notes for you, you that I'll link to in the show notes, if you fall down, you could create a bigger social media crisis. So the more information, the better. Now, when the crisis is a category two crisis, that's the partial responsibility. Remember, this one is all about the facts. Tell people what you know when you knew it, what are the plans to fix it. It's the indestructible PR crisis framework that I've mentioned many times before on this podcast. So this strategy is communicating facts. So this is why you need to have your website ready with all the facts that you can. Now, a tip that I provide for a lot of my clients, I tell them this all the time, is have an FAQ section. What are the questions that people are always going to ask you anyway, but what are the questions or what are the needs that you typically have in in a crisis? In the case recently working with a nursing home who is going through the COVID crisis. And they had Covid in the walls that came through the doors of the nursing home and it was just one patient. But what we needed to do in this case is I advise them to put as much information as they could on their website about their Covid preventative actions that they were taking there. It wasn't a big story yet because it was just one case of COVID but they knew it was going to be a news story and sure enough, it was. But when it happened, it didn't become as big of a story for them because the press went to the website to get a lot of the FAQs to find out what the policies and the procedures were in the case of a Covid outbreak at that location. So they used it, they planned for a crisis that they knew was right around the corner. Think of your website as your main hub of information and the social media and all the other channels, those are going to be your spokes to speak to your specific stakeholders. So when the communication objective is is to clean up your mess, that's that category three. Or it could go up to category five, right? That's when you want to use social media. So you are pointing all your fire hoses to the fire. So if your crisis erupted on Twitter, take your response to Twitter. If a group is targeting you on Facebook, you have an activist group targeting you or you have customers going insane on your Facebook page and they're showing, sharing all these accusations and all of these horrible posts about you and they're calling for resignations, they're trying to cancel people within your organization. Go to Facebook, fight them where they are with information and facts. You want to put the fire out in front of you. So the one that's the hottest is the one you're going to point the hoses to to put it out. So when it comes to this Cat 3 response Remember, if you're a frequent listener of the podcast, you know it. It's the PR crisis respons response framework. Step one is owning it. It's all the A's you address. Admit, acknowledge, apologize, accept accountability. That will always happen in any type of response that you have. The second step is going to be explaining it. This is the context. These are the facts. Why did it happen? The third part is the promise. It. It's the reputational repair portion of the framework. What are you planning to do? What promises are you making so it won't happen again? And then you want to customize all these key messages for the social media platform. Now we are talking about planning. How can you plan to write something about a crisis when the crisis hasn't happened yet? Well, the fact is, most issues that emerge and form a crisis, most of them are issues you're already familiar with. You already know what they are. It could be high prices, high rates, bad service. Those are the ones that you can already plan on and prepare for. The ones like misconduct, misbehavior. It's not as if you can write that statement in advance, but that's why it's important to make sure that you're doing all three of these steps. You're probing, you're researching, you're always monitoring to see what's out there and what's happening. You're planning for any type of a crisis in case something does happen. And then the last piece of it is just predicting the response. If you do the first two, you're going to be able to spot on the horizon if something is coming, and then you can plan for it. Can you fully prepare for a social media crisis? No, of course not. Because every crisis, especially on social media, is different. It's almost impossible to plan for a crisis on a platform based on something you simply cannot control. And those are conversations. So three easy steps to building an indestructible social media crisis. Probing, planning and predicting the response you'll need. That's all this week on the podcast Next Week is the second of this two part series on social media. Next week it's how to use Social Media as a Public Relations tool. Social media isn't just for marketing, it is an effective channel for PR and crisis management. And if you want special access to my new book, Indestructible Leader, Reclaim Control and Respond with Confidence in a Media Crisis or First Access to Indestructible pr, Masterclass and Blueprint, you'll want to follow me for more information by going to mollymcpherson.com subscribe. Then you'll get weekly emails about the podcast in addition to the upcoming book and masterclass. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.