3 Ways to Successfully Deal with Social Media Crisis

When you own a business, no matter the size, you are bound to face a PR crisis at some point. When it comes to handling a PR crisis over social media, there are a few tips to help you since a situation can spiral out of control in a matter of minutes.

Hopefully, when your crisis comes it will be a small one that you have to deal with, and not a massive disaster. But whether it is a glitch in your radar or a full on PR tsunami, here are a few companies that faced problems, and tips we can use to deal with our own.

1. Acknowledge Problems Quickly

When Domino’s Pizza failed to keep up properly on their social media monitoring, it blew up in their face. Two employees from a single branch posted a video on YouTube of them doing disgusting things to the food. The man conducting the majority of the tampering stuck cheese up his nose, passed gas on the salami and proceeded to use the tainted ingredients on a customer’s sandwiches.

This caused a major PR backlash as within hours the video was given thousands upon thousands of hits. Since Domino’s was not on top of their social media, they were unable to take care of the problem more quickly. While it was only a day until they addressed the issue, the video spread to hundreds of thousands of people.

Both the man and the woman were fired, and the issue put to rest with an apology and a promise to earn back customer trust. But something good came out of it, as Domino’s upped their social media game.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from this is that it is important to acknowledge problems as quickly as possible. To do that, every tool at your disposal should be used, including social media, to keep track of your company’s public image and presence.

2. Fire Your PR Representative

A bad PR representative can become a total nightmare for any company, as the manufacturers of the Avenger controller unfortunately found out. All thanks to an obviously incompetent (and hilariously stupid) owner of Ocean Marketing called Paul Christoforo.

As you can see on Penny Arcade’s official archive of emails sent between a reader named Dave and Christoforo, a single person can cause quite a stir. Especially when they make promises of deadlines they can’t meet, improperly handle the funds of prepayments, provide the wrong information to inquiries, try to pretend they have “connections,” anger off customers and get on the wrong side of well known names in the tech world.

Reading through these, you might be pretty stunned. The pure childish, confusing, misspelled and offensive nature of this moron is like watching a marketing campaign handled by a 12 year old. The makers of Avenger agreed and fired him, but the damage was done.

Thankfully, the damage seems to have been isolated to this wannabe PR has-been. The company itself, and the product, were not blamed for his missteps, and they managed to handle the issue well.

Moral of the story? Never give Paul Christoforo or Ocean Marketing your money. That includes all the other similar marketing scammers in the business world.

3. Keep Things Lighthearted

When you run a social media site using multiple posters who keep up with your profiles, there is always a chance a mistake might occur. They might post something viewers find offensive or accidentally post to your account instead of their own.

Red Cross had the latter happen, after a social media freelancer accidentally posted the following message to their Twitter:

“Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch beer…. when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd”

At first glance, it is more humorous than offensive or dire, right? Red Cross thought so, too. Which is why when it was noticed an hour later, a light and amused response was given:

“We’ve deleted the rouge tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys.”

They also posted a small blog post saying that they realize these mistakes can’t be undone due to the nature of the Internet. But that they apologized and it was time to move on. Everything was casual, and they didn’t beg for forgiveness or overreact to the situation.

It actually ended up turning into a positive campaign. Dogfish responded to the whole thing by asking their customers who followed them on Twitter to retweet #gettngslizzerd and donate to Red Cross. They made a fair bit of change, and everyone was happy.

Conclusion

The Internet presents more risks for companies due to the potential PR mishaps that are harder to look out for. However, it also gives a chance to diffuse them at a much faster rate, which makes it worth that risk. Get smart: Start a new creative campaign, offer something for free, etc

Using the three examples above, you can see how to handle future issues that crop up for your company, without having to go into a panic.