5. New Practice #5: The Pre-Crisis Doctor
When calamity strikes at a company, reputation and crisis management become a priority. The executives immediately call in the PR team to identify and neutralize the situation by creating an appropriate response to the public outcry. Why is the PR team called upon after the crisis occurs? As a communications professional, you should be thinking proactively about the possible levels of crisis escalation long before an issue arises. In social media, the conversations are in the public view and through technology are easy to find and address. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, the public’s mainstream use of social media can become rapid-fire, turning the slightly negative molehill of a situation into a full-blown mountain of catastrophe for your company. You need to be well informed and have intelligence at your fingertips. You and your peers must also be trained in social crisis management. Preparing and handling crisis through newer communications channels is different than situations in years past. Your strategy and planning for a crisis starts long before the incident actually occurs.
Think of any of the casebook crises including BP, Domino Pizza, Kenneth Cole, Nestlé, and United Airlines, to name a few. Do you think these brands had a team of professionals proactively monitoring their social media channels, ready to handle different levels of crisis escalation? Wouldn’t it benefit a company to take a proactive approach to crises, knowing immediately how to handle an urgent situation through any particular channel, especially now that the channels include social media? It would be even better if PR professionals along with customer service were documenting instances of how to handle certain circumstances; everything from the proper response and statements needed, from the bottom right up the chain of command. The company should be categorizing different issues that may occur and identifying, in advance, exactly who would be involved on the inside to evaluate and handle specific issues (brand-related, product-related, or miscommunication). In most cases, when a negative situation arises, the conversation starts and escalation occurs quickly. Unfortunately, for most companies, negative sentiment at a full-blown crisis level, and the public dissatisfaction that results, is editorialized through all media channels.1
The Pre-Crisis Doctor, your new PR practice #5, was born out of the need to proactively monitor social media conversations and track the sentiment of customers and other stakeholders when conversations are under “control.” At the same time, the need for new media handling must also be integrated into a company’s overall crisis plan. On your Social Media Strategy Wheel, planning for social media crisis touches on your monitoring, channel distribution, content/communication, and measurement planning (see Figure 5.1). The PR team who takes on the role of the Pre-Crisis Doctors realizes the crisis strategy for social media is:
• One part monitoring and having the right tools in place.
• One part prepared communication response and knowing the appropriate company personnel who participate.
• One part measurement, as a company moves through the evaluation of a negative situation, benchmarking whether their communication was effective.
Figure 5.1. The Social Media Strategy Wheel: PR Practice #5
Today you’ve seen through case studies of crises the results of a lack of response when customers have a problem or stakeholders take issue with your company. Today’s brands are in the public’s critical eye with their products and customer service as the topic of constant conversations. Communication travels more quickly than ever before through social media channels. As a result, the PR professionals who used to take the role of crisis manager must now expand their knowledge and skills to meet the requirements of a new practice, the Pre-Crisis Doctor.
What Are the Responsibilities of the Pre-Crisis Doctor?
The difference between the PR crisis manager and the Pre-Crisis Doctor is the ability to listen long before a crisis escalates. The Pre-Crisis Doctor also has a strategy for different channels that may cause the crisis, understands how different areas of the company and employees in those areas will respond, and knows how to evaluate and avert the situation from either starting in the first place, or at least from spiraling out of control. It’s one thing to prepare how you would manage the situation, but it’s an entirely different strategic process to try to prevent it from gaining momentum. An ideal scenario would always be to stop the crisis from even occurring. But, you know this isn’t realistic. Therefore, you use your preparedness and quick response to slow down the momentum to avoid reputation damage. Why? Because today you can monitor, evaluate, and respond more proactively to all different types of media, including the negative conversations in social media communities. There should be no waiting or hesitation. If two hours of crisis go by, then those two hours have the potential to lead to serious reputation issues and damage.
How do you become a Pre-Crisis Doctor? Part of the process is learning to monitor more closely and on a constant basis. Social media doesn’t stop at the close of the normal business day and doesn’t take off on holidays. People are talking into the late hours of the night and early hours in the morning. Years ago, the crisis manager would have a plan in place that covered what would happen if negative communication appeared in traditional media. Then, at the onset of web communications, businesses found the benefits of 24/7 interactions and a broader reach, but this also meant information about their issues could spread faster through online media, when a negative story broke.
Now, the media doesn’t have to break the story because consumers can easily share their news, negative views, or opinions in their communities, followed by the media reinforcing the escalating issues. A perfect example was the fate of the US Airways flight, which landed unexpectedly in the Hudson River in New York. Twitter broke the news before the network news vans arrived. With ongoing monitoring in place, the Pre-Crisis Doctor has a better chance to pinpoint a mounting issue, evaluating it more quickly, focusing on the change in sentiment, and carefully responding to slow down the rapid pace of sharing before the issues gets completely out of hand.2
Going beyond the crisis manager, most Pre-Crisis Doctors prepare several additional resources integrated into their crisis planning. These resources include the following:
• A Social Media Crisis Organizational (Org) Chart
• Comment Response Chart (Action = Reaction = Action)
• The Shell of the Message
• Your Target Media (Old and New)
• An Identify, Evaluate, and Train (IET) Process for Social Crisis Measurement
A “Crisis” Org Chart
When you begin working at an organization or you’re the agency working with a new client, one of the first resources you review is the organizational chart. A good chart lays out the structure of the organization and allows you to see levels of communications accountability. The Pre-Crisis Doctor knows the same type of chart must be constructed for crises. It’s called the Social Media Crisis Org Chart (Crisis Org Chart) and identifies who is involved in social media crises at any given time. Some companies integrate the Crisis Org Chart into their Comment Response Chart (to be discussed shortly in the section on Comment Response Chart) or create a completely separate resource. The most common Crisis Org Charts start with a bottom layer of communications activity, or for the purposes of this discussion, you can call it the lowest level of escalation. Any comment or situation will determine the level of escalation, especially as it becomes negative in nature.
Following are potential levels of escalation and how you might consider aligning specific members of your company:
• Layer 1 or Level of Escalation 1: No Threat
Members of Customer Service Representatives (CS Representatives), Public Relations and Marketing (members of the Account Team), and the general employee population may respond and even share the information.
• Layer 2 or Level of Escalation 2: Pending Situation
Customer Service Representatives (although Customer Service Managers may be alerted), Public Relations and Marketing account team members (although PR and Marketing managers also monitor conversations), Sales, IT, and other key technical or product specific experts may be required to answer specific inquiries.
• Layer 3 or Level of Escalation 3: Negative Situation
Customer Service Managers (Directors or Executives may be alerted), Public Relations and Marketing Managers (Directors or VPs may be alerted), Sales, IT, and CS Representatives and specific key technical may be required to answer specific inquiries.
• Layer 4 or Level of Escalation 4: Pending Crisis
Customer Service Management Team and Public Relations and Marketing Management are all abreast of the situation (Senior Executives and CEO alerted). The designated spokesperson, skilled to handle crisis communications, or member of leadership team may be called upon to respond.
• Level 5 or Level of Escalation 5: Crisis
Senior Leadership or CEO responds to the crisis (Cabinet and/or Board members alerted); all members of the company understand the nature of the situation and are careful to direct inquiries to the Public Relations department or a Public Information Officer (who works closely with a Chief Reputation Officer and the CEO).
An organizational chart of key contacts involved in the social media responses is necessary, especially as the crisis reaches different levels of intensity. The preceding example could work for a number of companies but is certainly not specific to every company, in every different industry. Whether your Crisis Org Chart looks similar to this example, or you figure out your own levels of escalation, charting those levels with the appropriate parties accountable for responding leaves little room for questions or hesitation. You don’t have time to hesitate when it comes to the crisis response process, which should move swiftly and seamlessly through your company prompting the proper messages via the appropriate channels.
In the preceding example, the Pre-Crisis Doctor realizes crisis communications does not only involve the PR and communications team, but social media also requires you to think about the different members of your company and the departments that need to be involved. Your levels of escalation and those who participate will vary depending on how you generally handle crisis in your organization, along with a new emphasis on who steps in to address the situation through social media channels and when. You shouldn’t wait until Level 4 or 5 crisis to figure out who’s involved with the appropriate social media response. You definitely want to know beforehand the proper handling of comments, concerns, and public outcry through any of the social media channels.
Comment Response Chart (Action = Reaction = Action)
It’s better to prevent the situation or manage it by lessening the severity with a response immediately addressing the issue at hand. Companies are learning to listen more closely to the dialog of their customers, the media, bloggers, and so on, whether it’s positive praise, product questions, service issues, organizational concerns, or outright anger. As the Pre-Crisis Doctor analyzes how the organization moves through different situations, the conversations are documented and separated into “conversation buckets.” These are the buckets that house information or intelligence on best practices.
The conversations buckets become the infrastructure of your comment response chart, which walks (or makes the company run) through a number of different scenarios, whether it’s with customers or other stakeholders. Each action (comment) through the chart has a “Yes” or “No” response, which then enables the company to identify its reaction or determine the manner in which a situation needs to be handled. A comment response chart is different for every company because it’s customized or prepared to include different types of actions, evaluation, and thoughtful responses. Of course, as you move through a comment response chart, an action causes a reaction, which then in turn causes a new action on the part of the team handling the comments (Action = Reaction = Action). It’s imperative to have a system in place to keep actions and reactions positive and moving toward a resolution at all times (in the case of a negative situation). In some cases, the intelligence you gather leads to a favorable outcome and in other cases to some serious lessons learned.
The most famous example of a comment response chart, on which many companies base their evaluation and response, is the Air Force Response Chart, updated January 2008.3 This chart sets a standard for comment, evaluation, and response, also taking into consideration transparency, tone, sourcing, timeliness, and influence. Many companies base their response system on this chart. Of course, you must do your homework and identify types of comments and possible situations specific to your company and industry, as well as how to work with other departments in your company to document actual situations and their handling in the past. This exercise creates response buckets or intelligence available to the PR and communications team, or any other member of the crisis team who needs information quickly on a particular scenario.
Although every company is different, a few of the common conversation buckets may break down in the following way:
• Positive praise
• General company questions
• Information on marketing or promotions required
• Specific product-related questions
• General community questions
• Frequent types of miscommunication
• Bad experiences
• Spam messages
• Angry Rager’s Rant, with or without cause
• Deterrent Detractor’s hate, without cause
After you have your comments/situations into buckets, you can then decide the three major ways your company responds: 1) all employees can answer, 2) specific departments answer targeted questions, or 3) PR/communications and specific departments answer negative or inappropriate comments.
It’s important to show how comments are routed in different ways so that appropriate parties can answer everything from the positive company praise, down to handling the hate of a Deterrent Detractor. The public “all employees can answer” is certainly the simplest of the comment response routes. This part of your system is focused on the positive praise and comments reshared with other community members. The second area is specific to questions related to customers, whether it’s a specific product-related question for customer service or a PR and/or marketing question relating to a specific promotion or campaign. Or it could also be a comment/question that’s geared for another member of your community; in this case, a company representative should not reply. The third area is the negative and inappropriate comments, which of course needs careful handling. These comments may be managed by the communications team (with the help of other subject matter experts), up the chain of command to more senior team members, who may be required to address the public through various social media channels.
Of course, understanding the individual(s) behind the negative action can also determine the type of reaction required. There’s a huge difference between how you would handle a current customer’s upset, versus the angry person on a rant (the angry “rager”) versus a deterrent detractor who hates the company and will not change his opinion (who you simply monitor, but don’t respond to). You also need to focus on the influence of the person or the people who are causing the disruption. Remember, someone can be an influencer with a large number of friends and followers, or a person may be influential, in which case their network is smaller, yet they most certainly can sway others to think negatively. Although everyone is important, priority timing and action may be tied directly to influence and the relationship the brand has with the person or people at the heart of the escalating situation.
The Shell of the Message
With social media, you may face the small conversation mishap on Facebook or Twitter to the full-blown “tornado” crisis in the form of a YouTube video. The perfect scenario would be that many of these situations are already properly documented and placed into your Conversation Buckets identified earlier. You should also have an internal sharing system in place for all members of the crisis team to easily access the documented information during the crisis situation. Anticipate what could happen and go on the offense.
In April 2010, not only did traditional media keep the BP oil spill catastrophe alive, so did social media. Of course, BP should have responded in a more timely fashion, and the company was criticized for inappropriate comments. It was also clear they did not anticipate other details that became public (and consumer-generated) as the story unfolded. As a Pre-Crisis Doctor, you must dig deeper for those “smoking guns” and make sure you have the information and a proper response (as a part of the shell of your message) before someone makes it public knowledge and catches you off guard. Of course, whether you bring it out into the open or it’s called to your attention, you must recognize the situation, acknowledge to the public what occurred (factually), and apologize again and again, if necessary. The apology will hopefully make it easier for the organization to move forward.4
Of course, every situation is different, and it’s almost impossible to prepare detailed responses in advance. However, you must think about situations that may occur and what is your company’s policy with respect to those situations. This information forms the shell of your message. For example, a well-known situation prompted @ComcastCares on Twitter, when a service repairman fell asleep on the customer’s couch and the situation. What about the Dominos’ franchise employees defacing the pizza and the Dominos Brand? In both instances, you most likely have an immediate response: Our company does not find this acceptable, and these types of actions will not be tolerated. Another example is a customer complaint about your product or service. You may not know the exact situation, but you can certainly let the customer know that you are sorry for their frustration and you are researching the details quickly. You would offer a response with a reasonable timeframe to get back to your customer.
You may also identify specific situations in which you immediately ask a customer or another stakeholder to reach out to you directly or to customer service directly, placing them in touch with someone who can help them quickly. This is also a part of the shell of your message when a negative situation surfaces. There are hundreds of scenarios that occur in each of the Conversation Buckets. Knowing the type of situation helps to frame out your mode of response, so you can weather the situation and get it back on the right track. In some cases, just a response acknowledging what happened with a sincere apology can put the upset or angry person at ease.
Your Target Media (Old and New)
Before an issue escalates, you must identify and prioritize those influencers who you will alert at the onset of a crisis. Crisis managers were skilled at pinpointing the priority media, and today we include bloggers as powerful influencers during a crisis situation. One key reason to build strong relationships with the media is when a crisis strikes, you have an outlet to tell your company’s side of the story. As you build relationships with journalists, they turn to you for information and commentary. If you have been a good resource and journalists can rely on you for quick, accurate information, then they will not hesitate to reach out to you when a situation escalates. Here’s where the relationship building skills pay off.
It’s a similar situation with bloggers. They, too, have a tremendous amount of clout for reporting information to a community of peers. A blogger, similar to a journalist, can post a story that will be shared and talked about with authority. The blogger is the trusted peer, and his perspective carries a great deal of weight. As a part of your social media crisis plan, you must know the bloggers you can rely on to quickly update their networks with your perspective. Don’t wait until a crisis strikes to try to share your news. Rather, you need to identify these influencers first and start the relationship-building process. They, too, require you to understand their interests, what they report on to their communities, and the best way to approach them with a pitch.
There is sophisticated software and tools to help you identify these bloggers and influencers in your network who have an effect on the behavior of your stakeholders. You can pinpoint these influencers based on the size of their networks right down to their amplification, generosity, and the clout they carry. Several of the free tools available also enable you to see how influential bloggers are in your industry, including Klout, Peer Index, Alltop, Ad Age Power150, and Twitalzyer. You will want to select the top, influential bloggers who have the greatest reach to help in time of a crisis. If you can quickly share your updates with influencers who will share with their communities, then you can reach an audience of audiences. Although social media starts as a one-to-one communication approach, your relationships can transform the one-to-one to one-to-many and then finally, many-to-many. Today, you need to have all types of media as advocates to help get out immediate information to the public and to share the messages that are critical to your company’s position or perspective.
Identify, Evaluate, Test (IET) for Social Crisis Measurement
You need to pinpoint the tools, resources, and platforms that help you track rapid communication during a crisis. Identify, evaluate, and test (IET) all your technology so that you can easily and quickly use it during a crisis situation. This type of homework should be done beforehand. Evaluating your social media monitoring tools for crisis is an exercise to determine your resources early, including your budget to license a software program and how many people will listen, evaluate, and respond to the comments, tweets, and updates. You also need to know which specific individuals incite the situation, as well as those who can help to calm and minimize the escalation. Your monitoring platform enables you to follow both closely. Make sure you and your communications team select your platform and test or trial it, so you’re familiar with gathering the information, selecting the right charts, and reporting methods, and you can generate appropriate reports for your executives who watch the situation closely. You don’t want to wonder how to track conversations, determine which charts to use, or figure out how to retrieve the best reports at the height of your crisis situation.
When you have a system in place and you have tested and worked out all the bugs, you are prepared to handle the unexpected. As a Pre-Crisis Doctor, you must set up potential negative or crisis keywords so that you can watch closely how people refer to the brand to catch any negative activity before it escalates. You should work into your daily routine watching for words that could be potentially damaging to your brand and be ready to investigate if you come across any that may be harmful to your company’s reputation. Today, simply checking your Twitter feed and Facebook page is not enough. If people have a negative experience with your brand, they may not necessarily say it on your Facebook wall or say it directly to the company via your official Twitter handle (although many use Twitter as a sounding board when they are upset with their brands). In some cases, they may go to a customer complaint site or a customer network and post exactly how they feel, paying attention to the unflattering details. If you don’t have your monitoring turned on, you won’t know the negative sentiment exists.
What Are the Best Practices of the Pre-Crisis Doctor?
Sarah Evans is a PR and social media consultant and the founder of Sevan’s Strategy. She was named in Vanity Fair’s “America’s Tweethearts,” Forbes’ “14 Power Women to Follow on Twitter,” and Entrepreneur’s “Top 10 Hot Startups of 2010.” In a Q&A, Sarah offered her thoughts on the best practices of the Pre-Crisis Doctor.
Q: How do you create a crisis communications plan for social media, particularly with an accelerated time plan (instead of the traditional news cycle), and how do you respond in real time—the first 15 minutes, few hours, and so on.
A: In the past when responding to crisis, you typically had 24 hours to channel your response to the appropriate media outlets to keep up with the traditional news cycle.
With social media hyper-accelerating news sharing, in reality, it takes only one well-placed tweet or social post for news to travel and for the fire to spread. For communications practitioners, this means strategizing in real time and having a crisis communications plan in place that stems from what to do within the first 15 minutes of crisis.
To respond quickly, it’s imperative to prepare in advance: Have approved key messages in place and ready to go at a moment’s notice, assign key roles for who’s in charge of specific response actions, and create an actionable timeline, as follows.
Social and Traditional Communications Channels and Pre-Crafted Messages
Start by creating a list of your brand’s communication channels, from Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms to the employee intranet, internal emails, and other traditional and social outreach methods. From here, pre-craft messaging for each channel. Hint: This isn’t just drafting talking points for your CEO, social messaging includes example tweets, Facebook posts, and information for your company blog, among other social assets.
A few other questions to consider and ask in advance: Does the crisis team have access to mobile channels? What types of crises are specific to your organization? What messages are appropriate to certain situations (for example, a natural disaster versus an employee issue)?
Key Roles: Channel Managers, Your Crisis Team, Brand Champions, and Employees
Channel Managers: Determine who disseminates your message for each channel, making sure to specify who is in charge of monitoring, responding, and sending out the message, so there’s no confusion. As an extra precaution, assemble a back up team for each position; you may have two to four people in place.
Your Crisis Team: To help news organizations find your sources when researching a crisis incident, identify the key individuals who make up your crisis response team, develop online bios highlighting these individuals, and include this in an up-to-date online news kit for easy media access.
Brand Champions: In addition to your internal channel managers and your crisis team, collaborate with the organization’s brand champions or ambassadors involved in your social planning. These individuals are critical for outreach, particularly during negative trending periods. Today, the traditional spokesperson is less trusted than the peer ambassador, who typically is not compensated, but has the credibility factor to help your brand.
Employees: Identifying voice and who’s going to speak, including the general employee population, is a key part of your preparedness. Remember, employees will go to their Facebook pages, and people will ask them questions. It’s the communications professional’s responsibility to implement an employee social media policy so that employees are aware of the regulations, have received training, and know what’s acceptable and unacceptable to share, and how to respond or to flag the post for a crisis team manager.
Public relations professionals must strategize internal communications to prepare and train company employees for crises on both the traditional, and social fronts. Your internal network of employees is the company’s first line of offense and an essential part of neutralizing the situation.
Social-Infused Timeline
Hours One and Two: The timeframe for social media crisis is immediate, with a focus on stakeholder and official statements in hours one and two. Although you have approved messages in place, you also must develop appropriate messages based on the situation.
During this time, you set up keyword alerts and keep a pulse of the particular crisis.
Hours Two and Three: In hours two and three, you send out statements via traditional and social media outlets, or this can be done earlier via a release. Make sure that savvy and powerful messages match the medium.
At this point, you also respond to online comments, noting how soon you will respond and what you will and will not respond to in certain instances.
Hours Three Through Eight: In hours three through eight, your team continues to monitor and execute your crisis communications plan, with hour five as a benchmark to pull together and/or to redirect your efforts. Although redirection can always occur earlier, you should be ready to change tactics, remain flexible, and switch your approach around hour marker five, if needed.
Q: How do you prepare for a crisis with so many different departments using social media? What type of coordination do you see between PR, marketing, and customer service and the general employee population?
A: Ideally, you want to have your departments collaborating during a crisis. Realistically, prepare for turf wars.
Prior to a crisis, know where employees from these different departments are online. Create the tools and resources for them, and divide up the segments of employees who have been identified and trained in advance and can handle certain responsibilities during a crisis. For example, there are human resources messages, business development messages, public relations messages, and brand/product messages, which vary by crisis.
To better illustrate having the right people in place with the right messages, I used to work with a trauma center. If there were an accident and the news media were reporting outside of the trauma center, we knew they wanted to hear from the spokesperson in scrubs (the attending physician). If there were no doctors available to speak, then a nurse served as our next line. We always coordinated in advance to accommodate the news media, and the same holds true with social media.
Q: What are some best practice tips and tools, and how do you monitor the conversation for a potential crisis?
A: As a best practice, develop a Social Crisis Response Matrix. This table organizes your available communications tools in the top column and the types of crisis and messages necessary for each. For example, if a crisis occurs through social media/video, then a video message through the same channel serves as an appropriate response. Messages vary depending on the medium used, from the email and your internal communications to Facebook and Twitter for external responses, and as mentioned earlier, need to be approved beforehand. In addition, everyone should have a checklist of all the communications resources available.
When monitoring the crisis, you may use Viral Heat, Alterian, Lithium, or Radian6, but in addition to paid tools, you can stock up your monitoring arsenal with free tools—for example, SocialMention, Topsy, and Google Alerts.
Monitoring the conversation for crisis depends on the hour. For example, in hours one and two, you need to watch sentiment closely. To demonstrate this, there have been situations with the Red Cross in which mobile alerts revealed that in hours one and two, the sentiment was 100% negative. Through monitoring, it became evident when the situation was neutralized and sentiment changed to 100% neutral.
Of course, in the case of the Red Cross and a recent rogue tweet (a personal tweet accidentally sent from a Red Cross social media account by an employee), the Red Cross neutralized what could have potentially become a negative situation by being proactive and not making a big deal. The sentiment remained neutral by a proper response, and the Red Cross moved onto more pressing matters. To prevent situations of this nature, make sure boundaries are set in place for your employees, and counsel them on social media best practices, including keeping work and personal accounts separate.
You can’t protect the organization if it’s the CEO who lacks discretion, as was the case of Kenneth Cole and his use of the #Cairo hashtag. (His tweet made light of the Egyptian uprising to promote his new line.)
In most cases, traditional and social media work the same way. You need to kill the story before it gets too far while keeping a constant pulse on your brand’s online monitoring. When the online conversation starts, it should not continue without you (because it will if you’re not paying attention) and could evolve into something bigger. If you prepare for the crisis, the situation becomes a nonissue, and the result becomes a nonstory.
The Pre-Crisis Doctor Check List
Know the difference between the PR crisis manager and the Pre-Crisis Doctor, who has the ability to listen long before a crisis escalates.
Learn to monitor more closely and on a constant basis because social media doesn’t stop at the close of the normal business day, and it doesn’t take off on holidays.
Create the Crisis Org Chart, which identifies who is involved in a social media crisis at the different levels of crisis escalation.
Analyze how the organization moves through various situations, and document these conversations into separate “conversation buckets.”
Build a Comment Response chart that identifies actions (comments) through the chart that require a “Yes” or “No” response. Through the chart, the company can identify its reaction or determine the manner in which a situation needs to be addressed.
Have an internal sharing system in place for all members of the crisis team to easily access the documented company crisis information.
Dig deeper to spot those “smoking guns,” and make sure you have the information and a proper response (as a part of the shell of your messaging) before your company and executive team are caught off guard.
Pinpoint the priority media before the unexpected occurs, including bloggers as powerful influencers.
Use sophisticated software and tools to help you identify the bloggers and influencers in your company’s network who have an effect on the behavior of your stakeholders.
Make sure the communications team has selected a monitoring platform in advance.
Test or trial the monitoring platform so that you’re familiar with gathering the information and selecting the charts and the range of reporting methods.
Train your team, or any other departments involved in the crisis communications, long before a situation can escalate out of control.