Are you prepared?

Social Media Alert and Response Team, an acronym that describes an immediate emergency plan involving a key group of decision-makers within your company or organization, that can respond to a potentially disastrous conversation chain or thread of negative consumer feedback starting to gain momentum within your social media presence.

Social Media Alert and Response Team

In social media, often the speed of the response can be more important than the content of the response. In other words, if you take 3 days to respond to a negative thread or potentially harmful chain of conversation – you can not only miss the boat but truly ignite a fire that could grow exponentially by taking so long to address the issue. The delay could consequently cost you the short window you have to resolve any potential issues.

So, how do you prepare to respond?

1. First, recognize that this will require key decision-makers within your organization.

Large companies, for instance pharmaceutical corporations, have a very established and methodical chain of process in order to command levels of approvals. This has served to protect them from legal action when making specific claims to their products and dealing with the unavoidable small percentage of users that may have bad reactions to specific products. In short, the larger your company, the more important a SMART EP is to your company to expedite urgent approvals in a clutch situation.

Determine who is involved in your standard social media exchanges and responses. This may start with an agency, if your social media is outsourced. Here is one possible example of a social media approval process:

Agency (posts messages/interactions) -> eMarketing (oversees online marketing initiatives) -> Brand (central decision-making for all things marketing) -> Legal (trademark, copyright, and other protective oversight)

In each of these divisions, there can be several levels of approval and structured management. However, when activating a SMART EP only one decision-maker in each division should be recognized and consulted in order to process the response quickly and efficiently. It should be understood that this individual will, to the best of his or her ability given the set of circumstances, approve and refine the recommended response as best he or she can. It is pivotal that the company or organization recognize that the balance of speed versus fully approved dialogue at this stage is monumentally in favor of the agile response. A slightly off-target response at this point is exponentially more powerful than a completely on-target response 3 days later. The decision-makers shoulder the burden of the “best available response” given the time-constraints and resources available.

2. Second, establish a criteria for using this chain of command to recognize when it should be activated.

Not every negative conversation is an emergency. Not every negative conversation is a black-eye, instead, most can be properly addressed and leveraged as an opportunity to demonstrate good-will from the company or organization. View most of the negative conversations as an opportunity to change minds. Even if the naysayer is completely unmoved by your outreach, most readers will recognize your efforts and if they are appropriate and reasonable – the results mean that you win over more potential consumer good-will.

Since the SMART EP chain of command is an exercise requiring some risks, it should be reserved for the appropriate circumstances. Abusing the chain could affect the sensibility of all involved and eventually result in a less-efficient process.

So how do you recognize when to activate the chain? This is different for every industry, and relies on several factors including but not limited to:

A. Demographics (younger demographics may respond faster, and require more SMART EP activity)

B. Size of SM presence (For instance, if you have a Facebook Fan Page community of 500K – you will need to be more proactive in order to maintain control. It is fairly common to have responses to a posting on a Fan Page of 100K+ average around 30-60 in just the first two hours of commenting. Smaller communities can be controlled a bit easier, since the response times will likely be slower among users.)

3. Third, set a specific time-table for each decision-maker to provide their individual input. The time table should be absolute, and when the time has expired – the decision-maker must respond to the best of their available knowledge.

This is critical to keep the circuit wired, between decision-makers and actively responding to the event. Without this critical component, the process chain can stall and the next part of the approval sequence can’t begin. Here is how to address the timing of the process:

A. Set a maximum duration for the entire process. This will again, vary, based upon the size of your social community and other factors. But for this example, let’s set an expectation of 4 hours assuming you are operating a Facebook Fan Page and the size of your community is approximately 100K. This is also assuming that your community is only moderately active, and you average 15-60 user comments per day even when not engaging your users.

B. Divide the maximum duration as-appropriate considering the number of decision-makers (departments) involved in the process (obviously, the fewer, the better).

C. Expect further reaction and engagement after your response has been posted, and consider a phone conference or meeting between the decision-makers to gauge the level of further response and action necessary. Your first response is the most important, and can reset (in a positive direction) the public’s perception. You may find that after your initial response, the SMART EP counsel can now allow the conversation to progress on it’s own or designate a special liaison to address the smaller issues that could ripple from the conversation thread. But overall, the initial response should set the expectations and appropriate response guidelines for your team, and your audience. In other words, once everyone agrees on how to address the conversation/issues, it should be relatively obvious how further responses should be positioned in regards to this issue/conversation thread and you could designate a single liaison to conduct these responses expeditiously.

There are plenty of examples of poor responses and poor response times, that snowballed into PR nightmares in Social Media. Spend a little time in Google and you will see examples that include Domino’s social media disaster and the Hyatts social media disaster, although this social media snowball was a little different in how it developed. There are also excellent examples of social media responses – such as Jet Blue’s excellent social media response (http://www.clickz.com/3625106). You can’t choose when a social media nightmare could develop, but you can prepare and make sure you execute a proper response. This potentially saves resources, and revenue, as well as a lot of time.

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