Sometimes, a crisis can come out of nowhere. PR and communications teams must deal with it swiftly to protect the brand. The best chance to make it through a social media crisis is to prepare ahead of time. That's where Radarly comes in!
We can have 2 types of crisis:
A crisis that affects only your brand, a product, a member of your executive. This could range from bad review of your product, a defective one, customer experiences nightmares to a global attack to your brand.
A topic that affects the society as a whole, thus your brand. Covid-19 or Black Lives Matter are some topics that might or can affect your brand.
It is important to monitor these two types of crisis to assess precisely whether it deserves more attention or not.
How to track a crisis that impact directly your brand equity?
Before:
List all the potential crisis topics (racism, animal protection, suspicious ingredients, CSR, defective products, your influencers consuming drugs, etc).
You can create queries associated to your brands, or do not hesitate to ask your CSM through help@meltwater.com.
We recommend to set up alerts so you don't have to worry when something happens on the Social Web, because you will receive a notification by email or Telegram (see Tips & Tricks below).
During:
Follow in particular the responses to the post that triggered the crisis.
Analyze the data, and add newly created hashtags.
Set up an alert on each new post captured to anticipate whether the crisis is starting to go viral or not.
After:
Was it a crisis or not? Observe the number of posts per day (or per hour). If the number of posts increases, it was/is a crisis. If the number of posts stagnates / decreases, no need to continue monitoring, it was not a crisis.
Identify potential influencers (both ambassadors or detractors) by sorting them by number of posts. It will help spotting people that you haven't thought about and who can be very active during the crisis.
Of course, we also recommend you to sort by Reach, because you might have a big influencer posting one comment, and it can become viral.
How to analyze a global crisis that might impact your brand equity?
Note
There is no "before" as we can't anticipate such events.
During:
Monitor the topic broadly to be sure to collect all potential posts. Refine the search as you go.
Filter on your brand, products, or even your competitors to get an overview of the weight of your brand in regards to this crisis.
What we call a global crisis is mainly a topic that affects society as a whole, such as Black Lives Matters, or Covid-19.
As you can see from the image above, we have created a query to analyze thne impact of Covid-19 on a set of luxury brands: which brands is the most affected? and the least?
We have also observed which topics were associated with the brand and the pandemic, and the sentiment associated with it:
Positive: it shows that Ralph Lauren initiatives has been very well received by consumers. Its image is therefore very good during this global crisis.
Negative: this fake news about Louis Vuitton could go viral and impact negatively the image of the brand. After seeing these posts, an alert on this particular topic can be set up to analyze whether it increases over time or not, and then adjust accordingly the communication and content around it.
After:
Make a report on the entire period of crisis to make a post mortem and have traces of it to compare it to the next one.
Tips & Tricks
Try to find the first post of the crisis, the famous "post zero". This can allow you to directly assess whether it can turn out to be a crisis depending on which initial influencer is starting it.
What is the weight of those influencers and people talking about it? You can take a look at the average potential audience, with this simple formula: total Estimated Reach/Volume of posts.
Set up daily or weekly reports.This will allow you to have a follow-up over time, and receive only the information you want to receive, thus avoiding information overload.
Always do a post mortem so you can anticipate the next one!
💡 Tip
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