Social media, big brands, and crisis communications. Oh my!

Posted: July 02, 2010

[caption id="attachment_7493" align="alignright"]© Andrea Danti - Fotolia.com[/caption]When was the last time your organization thought about its crisis communications policy? Probably not since your last crisis, right? If you've ever experienced a crisis, you know that waiting for one to occur is way too late to start planning how you’ll handle it.

Now, with the wide reach of social media, one wrong turn and your organization or brand could be facing a public relations nightmare. Here are a few reasons why:

[caption id="attachment_7493" align="alignright"]© Andrea Danti - Fotolia.com[/caption]When was the last time your organization thought about its crisis communications policy? Probably not since your last crisis, right? If you've ever experienced a crisis, you know that waiting for one to occur is way too late to start planning how you’ll handle it.

Now, with the wide reach of social media, one wrong turn and your organization or brand could be facing a public relations nightmare. Here are a few reasons why:

• Facebook recently passed Google in overall web traffic for a week in March.
• About 135,000 people register for Twitter and nearly 65 million tweets are sent each day.
• 61% of Americans access news online daily.

These numbers grow exponentially each day and brands are having a hard time maintaining their brands in this real time environment. Take, for instance, these recent social media public relations blunders:

Nestle's Kit Kat
In March, Greenpeace launched an Internet campaign to raise awareness of Kit Kat's environmentally un-friendly activities. Nestle, the makers of the chocolaty wafer treat, were cutting down rainforests to get palm oil to use in their candy production. Greenpeace published a Kit Kat parody video on their YouTube page and Nestle asked YouTube to remove the video. Greenpeace responded by creating a full-fledged internet campaign and had supporters email, comment, and call Nestle to demand a change in policy.

The result: A few weeks later, Nestle announced a new partnership with The Forest Trust to establish a “zero-deforestation” policy.

Southwest Airlines
Popular film director and comic book geek Kevin Smith started a Twitter riot in February when he was kicked off a Southwest Airline flight and tweeted about his experience. His devout 1.6 million followers responded by sending tweets to the @SouthwestAir account. The story was picked up all across Twitter, and even many national news outlets.

The result: Southwest publicly apologized for the incident.

BP Global
Currently, BP is enduring both crisis communications and environmental disasters. Millions of gallons of crude oil have poured into the Gulf of Mexico since the April 20th explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling oilrig. Animals, humans and nature in the Gulf States are in imminent danger as more and more oil piles up on beaches and continues to float in nearby waters.
 
But, much of the emphasis of the coverage of the oil spill has been placed on what a public relations disaster the spill has been for BP. The company launched a large rebranding campaign in 2000 furthering itself from British Petroleum; instead, the company was moving beyond petroleum in efforts to promote clean energy initiatives.

When the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sunk into the Gulf of Mexico, the rebranding efforts of the past decade plummeted into the watery abyss along with it. BP also quickly made a few, disastrous PR mistakes including photographers and journalists claiming BP was preventing them from documenting the spill and CEO Tony Hayword made several on-air, or recorded, missteps.

So, a few angry people on the Internet got creative:

• One Firefox plugin blacks out all mentions of BP with a virtual oil spill.
• Tumblr has pledged to match each $5 donation to Save Our Gulf made by its users. In consideration of your donation, if you have a Tumblr account, your background will be painted black.
• “Leroy Stick” started a parody Twitter account with the handle @BPGlobalPR. In just a few weeks, the account has nearly 160,000 followers compared to @BP_America who has just over 14,000 followers.

The result: In addition to the full-scale media blitz Hayword has been on over the past few weeks, BP has had to take action online as well. In addition to completely rebranding their website and social media presences, BP has purchased key search terms on Google and Yahoo! and opened up live-streaming of the oil spill.

How should your organization respond through social media in times of crisis?

• Be open. If there's one constant about social media and the Internet, it's how quickly things move and change. If you're not telling or commenting on the truth about your company, someone else will. BP’s decision to block reporters and photographers from documenting the oil spill quickly backfired and turned into one of many social media mini-crises the company has experienced in the wake of this tragedy.
   
• Simply put, respond quickly, but carefully. The ability to easily share items on Twitter and Facebook add significant value to any tweet or status update. When said by a celebrity or someone with thousands of followers, the story can spread quickly. Less than 24 hours after Kevin Smith was kicked off a plane, he had his ticket refunded, talked to several Southwest Air representatives and received a public apology. When was the last time you were treated like that at the airport?
   
• Don't attempt to control the situation. The biggest lesson from each one of these incidents is that you cannot control everything being said about your brand or organization no matter how strong or successful your social media presence is. Kit Kat attempted to control the situation by deleting a single video on YouTube. Instead of working in their favor, their moves backfired and forced the company to reevaluate not only their social media outreach, but also how an entire product was made.

 

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