The impact of social media on crisis and issues management

Sometimes, a social media storm can be started by human error. An errant tweet might find its way onto your Twitter stream because of a simple mistake. That might be setting up auto-retweet wrongly. BT blamed technology for an extremely sweary, racist and abusive tweet that went out from its official account.

Or that error might be putting a typo in an auto-tweet, like this one that went out from the UN stating that Ban-Ki-Moon was calling for a 1-state solution in the Middle East. The tweet was scheduled to go out while its author was on a conference call.

Avoid drunk Tweeting. Although I love the official response: a great example of using humour to diffuse an issue.

Or it might be Tweeting from the wrong account, like this infamous anti-Obama tweet from KitchenAid, for which it later apologised

Sometimes, it’s nothing to do with communications, but it’s the fault of your product, my favourite being the new Apple maps which couldn’t find its own stores.

Image from Anorak.co.uk

Image from Anorak.co.uk

And although this picture is nothing to do with social media, I just love how far this story travelled, even making the London Underground tube noticeboards.

Or it might be the fault of a marketing idea that’s just asking for ridicule. I’m not sure what BIC was doing when it launched pens for girls – honestly, I’ve NO idea how women managed to write before these came out – and no great surprise, it had a lot of flack on social media, including Twitter and review sites.

I should probably say here that BIC claims its pink pens have been very successful, particularly with American markets. Apart from people who watch Ellen presumably – BIC’s PR team asked Ellen to review the pens, which was a really bad idea – she ripped them apart.

But I wouldn’t really call these examples crises, as such, more a pain in the neck to deal with. Most of them won’t have any noticeable impact on sales, they’ll just see a few of the comms team working all weekend. For today’s purpose, when we talk about a social media crisis, we mean a crisis that’s happening in the real world, that’s playing out over social media. The way this happens has changed out of all recognition in the last 10 years. News organisations break stories on Twitter these days. Sometimes that news is based on mis-information.

At the end of 2010, Qantas suffered engine failure on one of its Airbus A380 flights. Without going into the technical details, a piece of the engine broke off and fell onto an island in Indonesia. The first reports that came out identified it as wreckage from a crashed plane – and looking at this picture, you can see why – but it wasn’t true, the plane was still flying.

The picture of the so called wreckage went up onto Twitter and news sites, was identified as the A380, and was reported on Reuters and CNBC.

Photo credit: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/qantas-jet-engine-fails-witnesses-tell-of-hearing-explosion-20101104-17f49.html

“We first knew it was a problem when our share price started to collapse. And that was because these reports coming out of Twitter that were reported by one mainstream media outlet on the basis of the Twitter reports that the aircraft had crashed in Indonesia started obviously causing a problem with the share price.” (Qantas CEO Alan Joyce)

The plane landed in Singapore, although not without drama, and Qantas put out a statement quickly saying all the passengers were safe. But even so, the story took its toll.

You can see what the team was trying to do, re-directing queries to Qantas, but this might have been a worried relative of a passenger, finding out whether the plane had crashed or not. There’s no phone number, twitter handle or even an email address here. There is, however, a helpful link to the Travel Insider magazine.

Having said that, Qantas did a number of things extremely well, including uploading a very quick Q&A, including outline details of what had happened, a dedicated page on its site including links to the flights scheduler.

It must have been chaos at Qantas when this story landed, and its teams weren’t on top of it at first. Qantas Travel Insider is a Qantas travel magazine run by an separate editorial team, who should have had a clear escalation policy for an event like this, but clearly didn’t. You can see here the team’s response to someone trying to establish what had happened.

http://youtu.be/yK5SzV4OBF0

The thing that really made the difference, though, is the thing that you couldn’t control – the pilot’s response. Needless to say this was recorded and uploaded to YouTube and was the story that accompanied the BBC piece. Watch the video on YouTube, as it’s a great example of how social media affects news.

The pilot was absolutely amazing, and his calmness under pressure was widely reported in the post-incident analysis (which also mentioned the training that pilots get for exactly this kind of incident).

Luckily the passengers couldn’t see what was going on under the wing, where it looked like this.

Until social media, when we knew there was an issue about to break, we generally had a good few hours to deal with it, while a journalist checked facts, found a suitable interviewee, got hold of the company to respond and so on. In that time, it was often possible to manage how the story broke, by providing alternative views, or dealing with disgruntled customers before the press got hold of them (obviously I mean dealing with them in the sense of making sure they were compensated and happy, rather than anything more sinister than that!). Social media’s completely changed all that.

This example is significantly less serious, but is a nice example of how social media spreads news. When British Gas put its prices up in the autumn, the Evening Standard tweeted the price rise. Paul Lewis, who’s a financial journalist – and any Radio 4 listeners will know him as a presenter of Moneybox – was the first to retweet the story, and within an hour, it was being tweeted by every major news source.

Credit: http://conversation.cipr.co.uk/posts/andrew.smith/diary.of.a.breaking.news.story.on.twitter

Some called it a rumour circulating on Twitter, but that’s enough these days. By mid-afternoon, the news outlets who’d reported the rumour were confirming it as fact, and by 4 o’clock ITV was asking consumers what they thought of the price hike on Twitter. Social media in this case wasn’t just breaking news, it was creating news, and providing a snapshot of consumer views to be used in the reporting of that news. Of course, in this case, the facts were true, and the chances are they would have been a fuss about it whether British Gas has managed the release of those facts or not. They chose not to in this case, saying they couldn’t comment on ‘rumours’.

1 What issues are you likely to face?

2 Which are avoidable, and which unavoidable?

3 What action do you need to take to avoid a crisis?

The big question, though, is can you avoid a social media crisis? The answer is sometimes. I break crises broadly into two categories: those you can’t avoid, and those you can, if you take the appropriate action. Unavoidable crises are, of course, the most serious– natural disasters, transport crashes, illness and so on - for the most part can’t be avoided. Qantas would fall into this category. You can always prepare for them, but you can’t control them. But if you plan for a crisis, by identifying the issues facing your company, you might find that there are some situations you could avoid by taking the right business action. Crisis avoidance is very much a business – not just a communications – issue. I wish there was a PR magic wand to make the bad stuff go away, but sadly it doesn’t work like that.

And sometimes you might just need to accept you’re going to have a hard time: staff up, and ride it out: it’s unlikely that British Gas would have reduced its prices in order to avoid a few headlines, for example.

I quite often get asked what this means for companies, and whether social media is a good thing or a bad thing for corporate reputation, and I think the answer depends on how businesses behave. I do think that it means companies have to be more honest and open, and that ‘spin’ doesn’t have a place in this new world. If you spin the truth, or try to cover something up, you’ll mostly get found out.

The most important thing, though, is that to manage that reputation before the crisis hits. The reputation you have before you go into the crisis is the one that will see you through it. Whatever goodwill or badwill you have banked with customers, prospects and media, will be what sees you through, so make sure it’s goodwill.