Stop Your Crises Snowballing

So Tony Hayward has committed to leave BP in October and will undoubtedly be able to ‘get his life back’.  However, the $64,000 question is whether it could’ve been different if they’d taken another approach with their communications strategy.

Social media has totally changed the face of customer communications – that much is obvious.  Just the other day a colleague of mine mentioned that “if you have a complaint about a company, and want it rectified, the best way is to tweet your disgust”.  The smart companies now employ people to monitor the Internet, and use programmes such as SocialRadar and Viralheat to keep on top of the blogs and micro-blogs.  Google Alerts are also useful for those companies that don’t have the same budget (although inevitably it doesn’t have the same reach as the paid for versions).

However, whilst it is all very well amassing this data, on its own it is useless.  It needs to be turned into information and then acted on.  The smart companies do this – if you tweet your disgust at a company then you are now likely to receive a phone call from their customer service desk (BT are particularly good at this) who then do their best to solve it.  No longer is it necessary to write a letter, or even an e-mail, and send it off to be lost amongst the masses of other communications.

What few companies recognise though is that social media also has a part to play in managing crises.  Earlier this year Eurostar totally failed to appreciate how much damage disgruntled customers could do when they started tweeting about the poor service and the fact they were stranded in tunnels.  Toyota faced the same problem with their brake and accelerator problems, as did Maclaren pushchairs in the USA.  BP unfortunately is the latest company to joins this infamous group who have underestimated the power of customer comment, or the immediacy of action.  It is no longer sufficient to sit behind closed doors, draft a press statement and submit it to the media for publication.  More often than not, the crisis has broken before you even knew there was one.

With all the tools available to companies in the modern Web 2.0 world, social media needs to be at the heart of any crisis management strategy.  This can either be in a reassuring role or an apologising role.  Whatever role you choose though it needs to be consistent with the company’s brand messages, take the appropriate tone and be relevant to the audience.  In other words, the basics still need to be right, despite the fact that there is a temptation in this 24 hour news culture to ‘just get something out’.

Managed correctly a crisis can often be resolved, or at least ceases to be as newsworthy.  Managed incorrectly it will, like a snowball rolling down a mountain, grow larger and gain more speed whilst causing all kinds of collateral damage along the way. 

If you want to find out more about how you can do this, book onto the CIM Kent Annual Marketing Lecture in October.  Entitled “Navigating a Social Media Crisis”, Paul Charles will share some of the secrets which may have helped the communications professionals in BP, Eurostar, Toyota and Maclaren.

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