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BSM. For crisis communications practitioners and marketers, that is fondly known as “Before Social Media.”Before social media, if you had a bad experience, you told seven people. If you had a good experience, you told one. Social media has given us a megaphone and we are using it to tell our story, for better or worse. There is no filter.
Your list of stakeholders now includes someone whose name you don’t know
as in #NotHappyWithMy____ – fill in the blank with the name of a doctor, nurse or medical facility.
We work with several companies in the healthcare industry, counseling them on issues management, crisis communications, social media and PR so here are some tips we recommend for negative social media commentary:
Be prepared: Any crisis communications plan today includes social media. If you have a plan, review it annually. Have your social media strategies changed since the plan was written? Develop a plan of action targeting sites where you may be vulnerable.
Be strategic: Negative responses can come in many online forums. You cannot nor will you control what people say about your brand in social media. We often get asked, “What should we do if we get negative comments on social media?”
If the negative response is posted on your social media site: A good rule of thumb to follow is to take the conversation off-line. That means acknowledging the complaint and offering a follow-up such as providing a phone number or email where someone can communicate with them one-on-one. Important to note that if you choose this route, make sure someone is at the other end of the phone or email to respond quickly and decisively. No one has ever won a battle with a customer on a social media site and you won’t either. Engaging negativity only leads to more negativity and the more you prolong the negativity, the more people will see it and chime in.
If the negative comments are posted on other sites: There is not a one size fits all approach to this, thus the need for a planned strategy. You can offer to take the conversation off-line or you can develop a strategy based on external sites. Negative comments on social media sites never go away. However, they can be “pushed down” with a targeted strategy such as:
• Increasing content on your owned sites, particularly with frequent blog posts. Content is king. Take advantage of that. There’s flexibility with a blog. It can be used as a vehicle for corporate news and milestones, friendly reminders, customer Q&A and as a traffic driver for all social media assets or it can be an opinion piece on a timely topic.
• Enlist your satisfied customers, patients, employees and partners to become ambassadors for your brand. They already post positive comments to your social media properties. Ask them to post to other sites as well.
Listen: Listening encourages engagement, builds trust and allows companies to cultivate a relationship with customers. However, sometimes customers are unhappy and take to social media to tell the world. All of us want to think that we have a stellar staff, employ best practices and have the unparalleled policies in place. Most of the time that may be true, but sometimes our customers don’t have the same perception. Don’t dismiss the complaint you received online. Check into it. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned there.
Monitor social media chatter: It can be an overwhelming task to monitor all social media for negative chatter about your brand. There are a few ways to tackle this. One is to hire a company that can monitor for you. The other is to identify key sites and assign someone in your organization to monitor those sites.
