What if it hits the fan?
This fear is one of the main reasons why companies don’t get in social media. Companies are worried that if they enter the social media space, they will generate bad PR. The problem is that this bad PR, if it exists, is on those social media channels already. In other words, the conversation is already happening, you may as well join it.
Yoav Tchelet, from AVIS, had the following suggestions to be ready to handle a crisis in your social media channels.
3 building blocks of crises management
Honesty
Transparency
Apology
I do agree that these are the building blocks but I felt that Yoav could have dived into these topics in more detail (in all fairness he was not given too much time). Where I would have liked to hear more insight would have been on the topic of transparency and apology.
In my experiences not every PR crisis can allow complete transparency and a formal apology is not always enough to calm the waters in social media circles. Maybe we can look into this for a 2012 #SMWF.
Multi channel approach
Yoav suggests that three channels should be utilised and integrated. PR, social media and internal communications. I completely agree with Yoav again and believe that social media management agencies and PR companies need to spend more time working together on their campaigns.
