Social media has become a primary medium for brands to connect with customers. According to the Harvard Business Review, 67% of consumers use Twitter and Facebook to voice customer service issues. However, less than 3% of consumers directly tag a company in these posts. This means that, although social media can be used to proactively implement crisis management strategies, brands often need to utilize social listening tools to effectively identify potential crisis points.
What Is Crisis Management?
Crisis management involves implementing strategies to deal with an unexpected negative event, particularly an event with the potential to gain public attention quickly. Because social media is now frequently used by consumers to voice customer service and product complaints, the crises facing brands often stem directly from viral posts on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
How to Identify a Potential Social Media Crisis
If a company can identify these potentially problematic posts before they gain widespread attention, there is an opportunity to publicly address the issue directly on the platform, turning a potential negative event into a positive display of customer service competence. However, this sort of proactive crisis management can be difficult to realize given the massive amount of data that a company must sift through to identify negative posts before they go viral.
This is where social listening tools enter the picture. Using AI software, companies can analyze large data sets that would be impossible to handle manually. These tools can recognize posts that are relevant to a company, even when the company is not directly tagged in the post. And, crucially, the best of these tools can accurately identify the emotional tone of a post, flagging particularly negative content that could lead to a crisis.
For example, NetBase Quid AI uses this emotion recognition technology, known as sentiment analysis, to assign a Net Sentiment rating of -100 to 100 to posts. This rating is based on both the positive or negative valence of the post’s content and on the strength with which the emotion is expressed. As a post’s negative rating approaches -100, it is more likely to lead to a crisis if it goes viral.
In addition to identifying single posts with particularly strong negative Net Sentiment ratings, this technology can also organize sentiment data into audience segments, assigning ratings to groups based on demographic characteristics or shared interests. With this approach, companies can track how their broader sentiment rating is being affected by a negative event, and can do so in more fine-grained detail, recognizing if, for example, a particular age group is reacting more positively or negatively to the crisis management campaign.
Implementing and Monitoring Crisis Management Strategy
While sentiment analysis and other social listening tools can help companies avoid crises by recognizing negative content before public awareness escalates, it is not always possible to head off a crisis in this way. But when a negative post has already gone viral, companies need to be able to quickly implement crisis management strategies built on a nuanced understanding of the issue and a data-driven focus on what strategies have worked to address similar issues in the past.
Social listening tools can be helpful in this process as well. Companies should analyze data gathered from previous campaigns to see which crisis management strategies had the best impact in shifting net sentiment ratings, particularly in the audience segments that may be more likely to focus on the current crisis. And once a crisis management strategy has been implemented, companies should continue to track how the implementation is affecting sentiment, adjusting as needed if the strategy is not generating results.
Equipped with the right social listening tools, a company can identify potential social media crises and effectively implement strategies to contain crises.
