126: Quick and Easy Ways to Use Social Media in a PR Crisis: The Tactics I Use With My Clients

Recently, I was on a phone call with a client who was onboarding a new communication hire when the topic of using social as a PR tactic came up in conversation. The client told the new communication specialist that he didn't feel comfortable doing live stream video when I asked him to do it. The answer for why he did it is because Molly told me I had to. But guess what? It worked. The client knocked it out of the park. And so can you. On the episode Quick and easy Ways to Use Social Media in a PR Crisis. These are the tactics that I use welcome to the Confident Communications Podcast. Helping communicators find the right response at the right time and deliver it in the right place. In this episode, I'll share with you quick and easy ways to use social media in a PR crisis or for crisis mitigation. These. These are the tactics that I use with my clients. Here's the bluff. Bottom line up front. Social media offers a tremendous opportunity for pr. More than people realize. Pitches, press releases, email, traditional media relations. Now they all still work for proactive PR and also reactive pr. You know, PR response. This episode is not the entire playbook. It's just going to provide you with some ideas to get thinking about how to use digital communication channels for something other than promotional, marketing and advertising purposes. So this is social media for PR crisis communications. That is crisis mitigation and crisis response. Now, I know many of you working as communicators, you want to nail social. But in order to do that, you need to keep up to date on all of the and that's not easy to do because the problem is they're happening so frequently it's almost impossible to keep up with it unless you are working in the industry of tech. And I don't believe that any communicator whose job it is to stay ahead of your industry's news should feel like you're lagging behind it in any way simply because you can't keep up with all the social. So I understand that feeling, which is one of the reasons why I'm glad my career transitioned to a place where I can do this, this research for a living, because it allows me to pass it on to other people. Like you, the listener. I want you to consider yourself ahead of the curve as well. Last week on the podcast, I discussed how to create a social media plan for how to prepare for a crisis using social media. You can go back one week to episode 125, build an indestructible social media crisis plan in three easy steps. You can also Find it in this episode's show Notes. So this second in a series, a two part series in using social media for pr. I'm discussing ways that you can use PR on a few of the major social media platforms. I'm discussing the strategy, the overall strategy, but I'm going to toss in a few tactics or tricks as I call them, just to get your brain starting to think about how you could use it in your industry. So let's start here. Which social media platforms are the best for PR purposes? Well, the answer is all of them. If people are having a conversation on a social media platform about anything, but especially about you or your brand, then that's a conversation you definitely want to be a part of. Now, how to use them. Ah, now that's the magic. Here's how I'll make it easy for you. There really are only two major social media platforms that will move the needle for PR response. Now this is in my opinion, from working with it, using it and also watching it very, very closely. There are two social channels and there's one online channel. So I consider these three channels online channels that affect news and public opinion. They create reactions online. The first is online newspapers, not broadcast newspaper. The second, Twitter and Facebook hard stop. Anyone could argue with me that there's other social media channels out there that are better, but I don't think so. Right now it's all Twitter, all Facebook. Now that may change in the future, but right now those are the two channels where two of your very important stakeholders reside. Your publics, your press contacts. Traditional media still plays an important role because the news sources, newspaper, cable, network news, online, you know, all of those channels are still very active online on social. But online newspapers at the moment are able to offer more of that digital mix. So they have more written content and then they add it with video and photo. So it's the perfect setting for social. You know, compared to a local television stations for instance, or even the network news, they'll give you a blurb, but then it's primarily video they want you to watch video. Video is very, very potent on social media. But people, when they're, when they're digging into a story or to a crisis where they're looking for a response, they tend to tilt towards newspaper because there's just more information there. But the focus on this episode is going to be social media for pr. Now the two big ones, Facebook, Twitter and I mentioned this last week in the episode about social media for crisis. Facebook is where you're going to reach your customer Primarily, Twitter is where you're going to reach those external stakeholders like the press, or you're going to get information from federal, state, you know, local stakeholders. But in terms of managing a crisis, you're managing your customers, their reaction to the crisis, and you're using that for focus groups, you know, for information and research. And Twitter is where you're going to get all of your press. You know, that's where they're usually sitting. Twitter, really, I view it, is the tool right now for. It's the PR tool. It's. It's where it's all happening. Now, that's not to say that journalists don't use Facebook or other social media channels to source a story. They go anywhere and everywhere to source a story. So there are a lot of digital tactics that a reporter or producer can use to piece a news story together. They're going to investigate all the social media channels, and they're also going to utilize websites like the Wayback Machine to view an old screen grab of a website. Or they could use a fake news debunker like Invid or We Verify. But what I'm talking about for the purpose of today's episode is where they're going, where the press is going to find their official statements for a story. And right now, no channel is superseding Twitter for that PR response. Reporters and producers don't want to keep pestering Paos pios, press contacts, any director of pr, head of communication for updates for these stories. The drip method doesn't work anymore in this 24 news hour and also this rapid social media cycle, if there's a story that's happening, it's developing in real time. A reporter wants to go straight to the stores. They want to see a tweet that is an official statement. All right, so now when we talk about social media, as I mentioned, Twitter's where we're going to get a lot of that official information. There's going to be organizations out there, channels or organizations or companies or brands that will use Facebook for pr. But in my work, in my research, what I noticed. So this is my opinion, if a brand is not on Twitter, it's a smaller brand. Most likely it's a company and organization that doesn't have the resources to be able to go on Twitter. There's usually a reason behind not being on Twitter, and in most cases, I find that it's because they just don't have the bandwidth, if you will. There's just one person managing it, or someone in the company thought there's no reason to go on it just yet. If you are a frequent listener to the podcast, you've heard me say this. If you're on Facebook, I want you to be on Twitter. It's just an opportunity there for you. If you're not on it, it's a lost opportunity. Okay, so how can we use Twitter and Facebook for pr? I'm going to use them both together interchangeably. If you work for an organization right now that is not on Twitter, you can use the same tactics for Facebook. But I'm going to tell you, get on Twitter. All right, here we go. How to use Twitter and Facebook for pr. Now, both of those platforms are multimodal. That means that you can post many different pieces of content to fit the need you. You can use text images, video links to video links to websites, GIFs. You can create statements within the post. You could put it in a graphic design. Or you can use the notes app on an iPhone. You can post official statements there. Like I said earlier, journalists are looking at Twitter for official statements. I know this firsthand from journalists. That's where they want to go. Twitter is a place where you can really interact with journalists back and forth and make your story move. You can get your response out there. And in many cases, it replaces the press conference. Because if you can get your information out fast and quick, which is the reason why most people would hold a press conference like, oh, we have news. We got to get it out to as many people as possible. So now we're going to put out a press conference. We're going to have a presser. But now you can do the same thing with one statement on Twitter. Then that also means you don't have to put your spokesperson out there live. You know, getting involved in the Q and A or having to walk away from a Q and A. So again, this is why social is so powerful. You can tweet the details. Reporters can follow up with you in the DMs. Those are the direct messages. So you want to make sure that your account accepts them. Also, you want to add the social buttons, those little widgets to your press releases. So you still want to use press releases. That is traditional pr. That's not going away. But make sure that that press release is mult media focused and make sure that you put information on that press release that goes back to social media. Now, let's say you want to bring the press briefing online. You can do that. You can stream and share on social media. COVID19 has changed the way we work, but it also changed the way the press works. So now virtual media briefings, that can be an effective way to manage like, like a big ever evolving event. And if you have numerous media requests all coming in at once, I'm talking about a big event, you could have a virtual media briefing. But if you're a smaller organization mid size, you can have the same impact with just putting updates on social media. So in the case of an event or a crisis or an issue that needs a response in real time, share your press releases, share blogs, share online articles, any initiatives that you're doing, keep updating. Social media is dynamic PR and it's a way to keep the story in play. All right, now here's another tactic for how you want to do this. Now, let's say for example, you're managing a category one story. I mentioned this last week, a cat one story, which I use as a nod to my FEMA days, my emergency response days is it's an event with minimal responsibility on your part. So you are not the main event, if you will. You are adjacent to the event. You're not the event itself. So it's a natural disaster, it's severe weather, it's anything COVID 19 related. It's some big story that connects your business or your organization to that story. So here's an example. Example. A storm knocks out power, an entire region. If you have any business that has to do with the restorations, that would be a response. It's not directly you that caused it, but you're responding to it. Another example, last week, eight people were shot and killed by a white man at 3 Atlanta Area Massage parlors. So this week on the NPR show on the media, they had a professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut who was discussing the patterns of brutality against Asian Americans in the US this happening long before Tuesday's tragedy. The tragedy was an adjacent topic, but it was an opportunity for someone from the University of Connecticut to discuss it. Another example, when the riots broke out last summer in cities across the US after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department or an officer with the Minneapolis Police Department. His trial's getting underway in Minneapolis right now. The St. Paul police chief, his name is Todd Axtell, he went to Facebook and he penned a response titled A Time to Reflect. It's a time for reflection. And he described what it felt like in those difficult days in Minneapolis. But here he was in the next town over and St. Pa. I had mentioned this on the podcast over the summer I mentioned that St. Paul had a lot of destruction in their town as well. But here's the case of a police chief adjacent, well, literally Twin Cities, you know, adjacent to Minneapolis. But he took the time to put out a response. So it wasn't just a response from him, it was from his, really his entire police force. He was saying this is how the St. Paul police operates. The crisis was with the Minneapolis support, the police department. But as all of you know, every police department had to deal with this crisis. They were a part of the crisis. And that's how he responded and shared it on social media. Right now, a year, well almost a year later will be a year in June. It has over 5,000 shares. So think about it this way. When there's a crisis that happens, there's always an opportunity to teach. I know some people are cautious about putting stories out there. They don't want to feel as if they're taking advantage of an incident. But look at it as an opportunity to teach and to help. If you're doing it for that reason, then you never have to worry about doing anything. Also, social media can help you stop the fires from burning if there's a crisis or an issue. And you can do it by dripping content that's adjacent to the issue. Now those examples that I just mentioned, those were big national stories. But if you look at within your organization, there's always going to be those evergreen issues that are going to keep coming up. And you can think of using social for crisis mitigation like let me just get you to start thinking about it. If you're in a town like you know that crime is going to spike in the summer, most likely in the winter. That's when utility bills are going to rise because of heat. There's always going to be heavy traffic in high season locations like tourist seasons. If you are in a college town, there's always going to be a spike when move in day happens. There's always weather cycles, there's always hurricane season or wildfires or even now we're in the middle of COVID vaccination rollouts. You know these evergreen issues are going to come up. You don't want to just sit on them. But use social media to drip content to help you mitigate any of these issues. Why do you do it? Because it helps you manage the expectation of your customer. Here's the trick to using social media. I mean using it for crisis. I mean that's a response. You're putting your response out, whether it's written, whether it's on video. But the real trick to using social media for PR is this idea of managing your expectation of your customers. So if you're a communicator right now and your job is running social media for your company, first of all, I'm sorry it's such a grind of a job. I know it is. Every time you sit down and you open up Facebook, right? It's like you get a pit in your stomach and you think, oh, what am I going to read? What message from a customer who's absolutely slaying us for something is going to pop up here? I get it, I get it, I get it, get it. But here's how you can make it work easier for you. It's this idea of managing how your customers use social media. And by doing that is managing the expectation of your customer and their opinion of you when you know that these issues are coming up. So it doesn't matter the industry, okay, you all have customers, you have consumers, you have members, you have students. No matter what you call them, you all have a stakeholder. If they are angry about something, they're going to let everyone know about it on social media. Here's a way to think about your job that will completely change it. Think about social media as a part of your PR efforts at all times. Okay? Yes, you can advertise, yes, you can do promotion. Yes, you can say, hey, today's the first day of spring. You can do all that. And you need to do all that, obviously. But what will make social media easier to handle is if you think about it in those PR terms, how can you get your customer to come off the ledge a little bit more that they're going to. We're going to ease the stress where you can. One of the tips is this is always offering instructions. Okay? Always look for opportunities to give them step by step instructions for anything that they need to do specifically in an area that normally annoys them or they don't understand how to do something. So it could be buying tickets, paying a bill, reporting downed service. Your wifi's not working. I have questions about the bill. Are you open during COVID How do I receive a vaccination? Whatever it is, step by step by step, use emojis, use 1, 2, 3. Use three green checks. Use a red X to tell them that this is what you don't want to do. Okay? It's a huge tip that works all the time. Another tip is you want to utilize your influencers. Okay? So now corporate brands, they'll dole out lots of money for influencers to pedal their brands online. You've all seen it. You can do the same thing in PR with information. You don't have to pay for play, but you can encourage people to have conversations on your site, even if it's bad news. Remember complaints, they're gold. Because you're going to get information about what your customer doesn't know. Some piece of information out there is not getting to your customer. And it's your job to figure out how to get it to your customers. So you if any type of information that you can provide on social media to your customer to quell some future grievance that's going to play out on social media, you can drip that out. Okay? Another step that you can do, and I love this one. The CEO, the president, leadership. Use it for reputation management. Okay? You can always tap into your leadership. It doesn't even have to be at the top. It could be anyone, really, could be any employee. Any information about your employees. But photos, stories, whatever it is, those are gold. I mean, those fly on social media. They love, people love seeing photos and video of people who work in your organization. But for PR purposes, especially in a crisis, I want to see the CEO, I want to see your president, I want to see your gm, I want to see them sitting down and telling me what's going on, what do I need to know? And I want to know what you're doing about it. And even if you don't know what you're doing about it, you tell me that you don't know what you're doing about it, but then you're going to tell me how you're to fix it. It's the three step crisis response framework. Okay? The first step, you're just going to own it. You're going to tell me everything that involves you and this crisis or whatever the issue is. The next step, I want you to explain it. Tell me what's going on. Tell me what you know, Tell me what you don't know. And the third thing, promise me what's going to happen next. Tell me the plans for what's going to happen next to solve my problem. Okay, so that's Facebook, Twitter for managing a crisis, your two primary social media channels. I do want to mention the other channels too, and how you can use them. These are going to be your secondary channels. And you're going to use this for reputation repair and reputation management, but not quite reputation response. So the first one is LinkedIn. Now, again, not your response platform. If something happens in your industry, I'm not going to LinkedIn to find out about it. That's a networking platform and I don't even know how I would respond if, if I saw that there. Maybe after something happens, though, there needs to be some type of image repair, reputation repair. Ask your CEO or ask someone involved, directly involved in whatever happened, to publish something. Their words. Because there's LinkedIn publishing that will allow you to create more articles. So if you, if you utilize LinkedIn publish publishing frequently, you're going to get a lot of eyeballs on your page. But Even if it's one page that your CEO who's on LinkedIn, she's on LinkedIn, have them write, you know, have them write an article or a reflection on what happened. That's a great way to get their word out and also to get out the values of your, of your organization. Another social media platform, YouTube, if you have videos, I want you to have YouTube, not Vimeo. It doesn't have the SEO power that YouTube has. It's owned by Google, so it provides you with a lot of SEO when you need it. So there's a crisis, there's an event. People are going to be googling the names involved, the name of the company, reporters are going to be Googling it. If you have video already on YouTube that has the right keywords and hashtags and it's written for SEO, that's all that background information is going to come up. It's going to be like first page information when reporters are putting a story together. If it's video, if it's a producer looking for video, they can grab video off of YouTube because it's all part of your PR collateral. But you can also use it for statements. If your CEO, if your head of your organization is going to make a statement, they're going to do a video. You can post it to Facebook, you can post it to Twitter, but you can have it link back to YouTube. So SEO, that's search engine optimization. It's not only for marketing and advertising. So if you want to boost any type of video and put your brand in a positive light, you want to make sure that people can find it. So optimize it the best that you can. Also, don't forget your video title. People forget that a lot. It might just say, you know, a statement from our gm. No, it should be a statement from our president about this or that, you know, whatever is happening. So if you're using YouTube, make sure you don't forget to write for SEO, the next social media platform is Instagram. It's not your typical PR channel, but you can use it to plant the seeds for crisis mitigation. You know, again, if you have those evergreen, those annual issues that keep coming around, start putting the videos and the photographs and Instagram maybe six weeks out, get people used to understanding like, oh, this is coming up and it will get you to get your PR play in play for when everything starts to hit. Now I will say you wouldn't typically use Instagram for a reactive like PR response. However, if you want to see an example, like almost to perfection of a CEO using Instagram for PR response, I have the person for you to follow and just steal that playbook. It's the CEO of Walmart. His name is Doug McMillan and he uses that platform, platform not just for proactive pr, he uses it for PR response. And I first noticed this back in October when Walmart announced it was pulling handguns from the shelves there. They said there was a number of civil unrest incidents there. So they were pulling them from their shelves, but they were still selling them. But macmillan put his response using the Apple Notes app, which I absolutely loved, and post it to Instagram. So go to Instagram, I have a link in the show notes of Doug McMillan's account. You can see how he uses it. So if you have a CEO who is more progressive when it comes to social media, why not toss that out there? I'm never gonna like tip my nose up at anyone who's using Instagram for PR response. And, and if you do tell me about it, I would love to see it because that's an up and coming social media network for PR response. Speaking of up and coming social media networks, Tech talk Closing in on 2 billion downloads at this moment also represents the 2 billion hours from 10pm to midnight that I have been on this social media trap since the pandemic. It is highly addictive, but it has extraordinary reach. And if you want to learn how to clean your bathroom or buy the best makeup or learn how to make the best salads, I mean anything you want to know you can find on TikTok. Someone is creating a video about it if you haven't used it yet, and that's okay. Like I said, this thing is very addictive. Think of it as a small time YouTube video and the videos are 5 to 60 seconds in duration and people create, you know, their videos. And it's not just young people you're going to see. You're gonna see all age, all businesses using, using Tic Tac Tic Tac, tic tac. People my age will say tic tac. You'll see like reaction videos of people who are, you know, reacting to something that they see for the first time and then they share the reaction. There's challenges, there's trends. There's a feature called duet. Like one, you know, a person will load a TikTok video and then someone will do a duet reacting to that video. And there's a lot of cringe worthy videos, like those addictive kind of doctor Pimple popper type type videos. And some of you are thinking, oh my gosh, it sounds like awful, like why would anyone want to watch it? But there's a lot of information moving rapid, fast on TikTok, which means a crisis can happen just as quickly. Right now I'm not seeing it for PR response. I'm not. And if someone wanted to use it, hey, more power. If you have the bandwidth to do it and you have the resources to do it, I would highly recommend using it. Why not? But right now, it's where the crisis is happening. So in other words, if someone or some brand gets called out on TikTok, it's going to go viral in seconds. Okay, it's just going to go viral. Now some of you who are not on TikTok, you never go to a daily. There was a big TikTok story last week. It's not a TikTok story, but it started on TikTok and I am almost positive you heard it. Take a listen.

I got something to show y'. All. So for the ncaa, March Madness, the biggest tournament in college basketball for women. This is our weight room. Let me show you all the men's weight room.

That video was on. Tick tock. That video caused a huge issue for the ncaa, especially during March Madness, which, by the way, my bracket is completely busted. Oh my gosh, what a year. But the ncaa, they had to respond. And this is what it sound like. I care about women's basketball and women in sport. We fell short. Update. Well, the women's basketball team, they now have their weight room and rightfully so. So just like the Walmart CEO on Instagram, if I see a brand or an organization using TikTok for PR response, I can't wait to see the first one that does it. The first person who decides to put a response out on TikTok, I'm going to love it. That's going to be super smart on the horizon, around the corner type thinking. You're going to have your reach. Yes, there's a lot of Gen Z on there, but there's a lot of other generations on there as well spending a lot of time on there and you could get just massive, massive reach on there. For instance, the NCAA story, I mean that was a 24 hour story that just flew. Why TikTok now, another social media app that's similar into the explosion. Not quite the numbers, but everybody's talking about Clubhouse. Since its launch almost a year ago, so Clubhouse has amassed more than 20 million registered users. It's still in the beta version and you have to be invited to use it and you have to have an Apple iPhone to use it and you need to be in someone's contacts to use it. But most people, if you just ask around, you can get an invite to be on Clubhouse. Right now it's mostly informative. It's, it's just rooms where people are talking about it's subject matter, experts in rooms. So you're looking at it for pr, for reputation management. It's not necessarily going to be reputation repair, it's not going to be crisis response, but you can use it if you want to. If you want to brand a reputation, if you want to put your CEO in a room, you want your CEO to be on Clubhouse, you know, but again, it's new. Not a lot of people are using it, but people are using it to break news on Clubhouse, just like on TikTok. And then it will, and then it will drip out in other places, but it is up and coming so you definitely want to check it out. Twitter Spaces is going to be the new Clubhouse. So I can't give you any advice yet on how to do it because it's so new, but I promise you I will. But speaking of Clubhouse, if you happen to be on it, you can find me at Molly McPherson. I happen to be speaking in a room this week about my new book. And speaking of, if you would like advance notice of my presale offer, you can sign up on my website now@mollymcpherson.com subscribe. You will sign up to receive my weekly newsletter but also all the information on the pre sale offer for the book and upcoming online masterclass and blueprint. So if you like the tips that you heard today on this episode, you're going to love the Indestructible PR Masterclass. Now I hope these tips today, they got you motivated, they got you thinking about how you could use social media in your PR efforts. Everyone's going to use them differently, but certainly you can find a way to customize it. For your brand, for your organization. If you want to be a top notch communicator, I highly recommend that you find the ways to use social media now to help in your pr, crisis mitigation, crisis prevention and crisis management. So that's all for this week. I hope to see you at the same time next week. Bye for now.