Last week, social media strategist Jeremiah Owyang and his team at Altimeter published their excellent report "Social Business Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally".
They started by defining a social media crisis as: "A social media crisis is a crisis issue that arises in or is amplified by social media, and results in negative mainstream media coverage, a change in business process, or financial loss." Quite a mouthful, but as good a definition as I've come across.
The research team group performed quantitative and qualitative analyses, using a combination of an online survey, interviews, briefings, and research on existing social business programs amongst 144 social business program managers (including 18 from what they term 'Advanced' companies) and analysed social media crises from Owyang's infamous 'punkd' list.
The bad news? Inevitably, given the growth of social media from both consumer and a business sides, social media crises are on the rise, and most are preventable.
The good news? It seems that companies learn from their mistakes: in all of the 50 social media crises cases studied, some sort of change was seen at the involved companies, with 52% of social media crises resulting in significant change by the companies; 40% of crises resulting in a change (of some lesser magnitude) by the companies and 8% of crises impacted the short-term finances of companies. The main cause of crisis was found to be "the exposure of poor experience" - i.e. customers sewing their complaints into the fertile ground of social media. However, the runners up make interesting reading:
Common amongst companies who had suffered social media crises was a lack of internal education, professional staff and an adequate triage plan.
Education, defining terms, building the guardrails.
a) Social Media Policy: This policy, intended for the corporation as a whole, should define how the corporation-at-large uses social media, as well as if and how employees can participate. For examples, refer to existing social media policies that are available online.
A written policy is not sufficient on its own - companies must establish a baseline process to reinforce and update the policy, as well as train incoming hires. Of 'Advanced companies', 13 out of 18 have such a process in place; for example, Intel's Digital IQ program is often cited as a benchmark social media corporate training program. Initially, the program was used to raise awareness of Intel's social media policy, and has since evolved into a certification program with over 60 online courses.
- A social media triage and workflow process distributed across the company. For example, a formalized social media response process at H&R Block guides associates through a needs assessment ("Compliment, Complaint, Tax Question, or Other Issues") then provides the appropriate course of engagement. With such a process outlined, social media practitioners across the enterprise know when and how to respond to customers in social media. Not in Owyang's report, but as an illustration, I love this well-known example from the RAF:
- A social media crisis response plan. An astonishing 56% of all companies surveyed lacked such a plan, even though three-quarters of crises could have been diminished or potentially averted.
- Monitoring: Companies should appoint a team that actively monitors social media channels during office hours and beyond. All involved should practice with "fire drills" that simulate real-life crises.
Form a social media Centre of Excellence, serving the whole company. Companies need a cross-functional dedicated team that serves the entire enterprise, or risk duplication of efforts, for instance, in education, measurement, and tool deployment. However, position the Centre of Excellence as a shared corporate resource for business units, rather than as a governing body that issues mandates. The ideal model is Hub and Spoke, where the Centre of Excellence actively support business units to deploy on their own.
Thanks to The Alterian Team for their thorough and interesting analysis, from which I've creamed only some of the worthwhile points from my point of view. For more, download the whole report from slideshare:
(This post was original published on our Breakfast Bunker Briefing blog, devoted to social media crisis issues)