Have you ever deal with a crysis in Social Media?

Crisis, what an awful and scary word. Crisis management is one of the most fascinating things in marketing, brands and organizations have crysis all the time, they are part of their cicle of life, thats why experts and communications scientist have been studying how to deal with crisis for decades.

But Social Media changes everything, ten years ago, crisis management was defined in a complete different way than how we define it today, and thats because social networks have given the people much more power to judge and review the brands, this is means even a small and local brand can have a big crisis generated in Facebook or Twitter.

This is why one of the most important skills a Social Media Strategist can have it to know how to deal with a crisis, and how to avoid them if possible.

A crisis in Social Media can be generated in two ways:

• Through a mistake:

Any community manager could make a mistake that could later transform into a crisis, like a spelling mistake, or promoting the wrong product, or forgetting to answer a private message, everything is a crisis waiting to happen.

• Through an unsatisfied customer:

Lets say an influencer complains publicly about your brand, and that situation escaletes quickly until it becomes a crisis, this is a very common scenario, and if you dont have good plans for dealing with unhappy clients, they can generate crisis very fast.

A few months ago, an influencer complained about a brand in my country (Argentina), the CM that took his complain didnt recognized the user as an influencer, so he didnt solve his problem. As a reaction to that, the influencer made the following tweet:

Of course, I will not say what brand it was, the thing is, that only three hours that HT got to the first place in the top tweets of the day in Argentina, and it even got to the worldwide TTs, the brand had a hugeee crisis, just because a CM failed to answer a complaint.

Crisis are out there, they are waiting to happen, and if we dont know how to deal with them, they can destroy our brands reputation (and our jobs), I believe a lot of CMs out there dont have a clue on how to deal with a crisis, we focus so much on learning copy writing, and content generation, and stuff like that, that we forget our main job: to ensure the brands reputation will not be harm.

A crisis in Social Media can provoke a brand to go bankrupt, people could stop buying your products, your negative image can go sky high, this is not a joke.

Have you studied how to deal with a crisis? Have you ever handled a crisis in one of the accounts you manage?

I manage a small crisis a few weeks ago, I can share my experience with you if you share yours