Why to Build a Social Media Crisis Plan and Two Examples to Prove It
With the vast number of social media users and brands taking advantage of social media, it’s no surprise many brands try so hard to stand out from the rest. Yet, with the timely, unforgivable nature of social media, it’s nearly impossible to live down mistakes, let alone manage them. That’s why it’s vitally important to have a crisis management plan for social media. Because let’s face it, no one’s perfect and mistakes happen, but just because they do doesn’t mean you can’t be prepared for when it does.
Without a crisis plan, mistakes can become disasters, not just for you or your social media team, but for the entire company. Just take Snapchat’s 2018 blunder that cost them a 4% decrease in share value, obliterating nearly $800m from the company’s market value. Not only can they hurt your bottom line, but they can also destroy your brand image. A few years ago, swimwear company Sunny Co. Clothing promised users a free swimsuit for reposting an image on their Instagram story, leading the post to go viral and rack up over 3,000 reposts in a short amount of time. This led the company to post an apology stating they wouldn’t be able to fulfill the promotion, enraging both their new and dedicated fans.
So, what’s even in a crisis management plan?
Well, in the realm of social media timing is everything. Thus, first and foremost you need to delegate who’s responsiblefor what role, and who’s going to respond in light of an emergency. This means knowing who will enforce decisions (likely executives or management), who will manage all the crisis efforts (probably management), and finally who will craft the perfect response or apology (your best creatives).
Once you know who’s going to actually be there, it’s helpful to know when to kick in that emergency response system. This is as simple as defining what will truly be deemed a “crisis” and can depend on multiple factors like if it affects the bottom line, specific topics, or something that poses a real risk.
Now, you can focus on the tone of the response. While you can’t write the specific response or apology, understanding how you’ll communicate and what to convey is the next best option. Reassuring customers of your core values and reminding them what you stand for is integral in responding in a manner that’s healthy for your brand image. Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind different types of responses for multiple forms of crisis, as well as where your company’s unique voice can fit in, like humor.
Lastly, it’s vital to know the chain of command. How and when will you communicate with executives? At what point does a lawyer need to be involved? (P.S. earlier is always better.) And what executive will be responsible as a spokesperson for the media? Knowing these things beforehand, as well as communicating them to those above you will make it that much easier when things are moving a mile a minute.
If you need to know how to respond to a crisis, as well as how not to, take a look at these two examples from past social media mistakes that turned into a crisis:
Dove
An example that still surprises me to this day how it slipped through the cracks came from Dove back in 2017. The ad, as you can see below, depicted a black woman who can be seen pulling off her brown shirt to reveal a white woman beneath wearing a light tan shirt. This is problematic for many, many reasons, and the internet did not take kindly to it.
The ad was quickly removed from Facebook and Dove posted and tweeted responses to the backlash apologizing and making it known they “missed the mark.”
Although their response was swift and seemingly well managed, the backlash didn’t stop there. Many criticized the brand’s apology as being lackluster and void of any sincerity. As the brand hasn’t exactly been racially-sensitive in the past, many people turned to question the seeming lack of diversity within the company’s management. This, combined with the long history of past racist advertisements for cleansing and soap products spelled a serious problem for the brand’s image.
Collectively, I would call this response by Dove a failure. Considering their rocky past with racially insensitive advertising, you’d think the brand would churn out something other than a generic few sentences in response. It would’ve been easy enough for the brand to double down on their commitment to diversity and release a full statement acknowledging their mistakes, what was wrong within the ad, and committing to a real change. Rather, the uninspired response remains a poor example of social media crisis management.
Dior
Just a year ago, the fashion brand Dior launched a new campaign for their fragrance line “Sauvage”, which translates to Savage in English. The problem arose from the visuals and copy of the ad, as it was heavily based around Native American imagery, as you can see below, with text directly mentioning indigenous peoples.
This immediately struck a nerve with many social media users, as the term “savage” has a long history of being used as a racial slur as well as a racial stereotype in advertisements. Additionally, many cited the imagery as an effort to appropriate Native American culture for their own profit. Dior quickly removed the ads from Twitter and other digital platforms and issued multiple campaign releases to large news networks like TIME explaining their process and sentiment behind the ads.
Most notably, the release detailed Dior’s extensive process with Native American consultants and even received a blessing from Hanley Frost, a cultural education coordinator from the Southern Ute tribe. Additionally, the brand stated they worked to move away from, “clichés in order to avoid the cultural appropriation and subversion that so often taints images representing Native peoples.”
Rather than responding immediately through social media, I thought Dior did a suitable job in fully explaining their thought process behind the ads, as well as apologizing for its insensitivity. By delegating their response more slowly, I think it served them well as opposed to throwing together an apology on social media as Dove did. Likewise, they did well in mitigating the backlash on social media, most notably Twitter, as the ads were removed and corrected promptly. It just goes to show that just because something starts on social media, doesn’t mean it’s limited to it, and often can be helped by releasing official statements before media outlets take the story and run.
