Social Media Crisis Management advice for Local Government
Part of the Critchsue blog series – Managing Social Media in Local Government
In general, many Local Government organisations, especially those in New Zealand, are novices when it comes to Social Media management and participation. As such, dealing with a social media crisis is often a “seat of your pants” operation. We need to get better at this activity.
Social media crisis management is not very different from crisis management in any other area, except that the time for reacting to an event is much shorter. A huge storm can be created by social media users in a very short period of time (Pfeffer, Zorbach, & Carley, 2014). Organisations need to keep their eyes open, be realistic and anticipate the storms.
There are three components to managing a crisis:
- Prevent
- Prepare
- Respond
Prevent the Situation
Prevention is better than a cure and often more cost effective. An orderly implementation that is gradually matured over time (Lee & Kwak, 2012) will go some way towards this prevention.
There are many tools available to assist with a successful social media implementation in an organisation. Some examples include:
An Implementation getting started guide (McGee, 2015)
Open Government Maturity Model (Lee & Kwak, 2012)
Book – Social Media Rules of Engagement
Social Media Profiling framework (Culnan, McHugh, & Zubillaga, 2010)
Google and social media searches using words such as social media implementation success will return many hits.
My favourite tools would be a combination of the Culnan, McHugh, & Zubillaga (2010) profiling framework to assess where the organisation currently sits combined with the Open Government Maturity Model (Lee & Kwak, 2012) to determine what the organisation needs to address next on their journey to a successful implementation, including maturing crisis event prevention.
Prepare for the Event
While we do our best to prevent a social media crisis, we still need to prepare to handle a crisis should our prevention techniques not be sufficient. This is a likely scenario with the proliferation of social media tools and sites and the ever increasing size and sophistication of the group using these tools.
The Social Media Rules of Engagement indicate this is the first line of defence when dealing with a social media crisis.
We also need to be mindful of the four lessons of social media crisis management:
- It is a risky business that could make or break a business
- You never know what is going to happen
- Fire Drills – practice dealing with fires
- Get ready to create – create content to stem the flow of negative activity
There are specialists around to assist with crisis mitigation and free downloadable crisis management plan templates.
Respond to the Situation
Inevitably there will be a crisis, or two, that needs to be handled. If we are prepared, these events should not be too onerous – the organisation will know what needs to be done. We will have participated in practice sessions so the actual event will be business as usual.
Digitlab suggests that when addressing a social media crisis the organisation needs to be honest, respond in a relevant manner and switch the location of the crisis to somewhere more manageable (e.g. frequently asked questions on a website. It is important that the organisation listens, sets the right expectations and is transparent.
Other blogs in Critchsue – “Managing Social Media in Local Government” series
Social Media Privacy and the Digital Native
Social Media Risk Management – Is it needed?
Social Media Analytics – Makeover Time
References
Culnan, M. J., McHugh, P. J., & Zubillaga, J. I. (2010, Dec). How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value. MIS Quarterly Executive, 9(4), 243-259.
Lee, G., & Kwak, Y. H. (2012). An Open Government Maturity Model for social media-based public engagement. Government Information Quarterly, 29, 492-503.
McGee, T. (2015, Dec). A local government guide to getting started on social media. Retrieved Jan 2016, from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/local-government-guide-getting-started-social-media-todd-mcgee?platform=hootsuite
Pfeffer, J., Zorbach, T., & Carley, K. (2014). Understanding online firestorms: Negative word-of-mouth dynamics in social media networks. Journal of Marketing Communications, 20(1-2), 117-128. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527266.2013.797778
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