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Current Climate
Crisis management is being talked about more frequently than ever. You must have a crisis management plan whether it be using internal resources or external agencies/tools. Just ‘waiting to see what happens’ is not good enough anymore. This applies to all industries.
In this post we’ll explain why tracking your sentiment is important as well as tracking ‘what’ people are talking about. Within a crisis, topics of conversation change quickly as do problems and their solution, which you may or may not be able to help with.
Here we tracked the conversations surrounding our local NHS, you can see examples of negative conversation topics ‘protective’ versus positive ‘#clapforourcarers’. This visual illustrates how you could identify a common problem amongst conversations in order to try and offer your audience a solution.
What is Crisis Management and Why Does it Matter?
Crisis management involves identifying threats to an organisation or industry’s reputation. It is important for you to identify threats as early as possible in order to respond and reduce the longevity of a deficit in reputation.
How to Identify a Crisis?
One way to identity a crisis is tracking sentiment changes over time. You can then have a better understanding on what engages negative sentiment, theorise why, identify when and then work out how best to respond to it.
Your response will be more sucessful if it uses content which appeals to your audience based on their psychometrics.
We show a target audience (dark green) benchmarked aganst the UK (light green). This shows that the target audience are typically more curious. You could use content which incorporates research-based content to resonate with the audience which may increase engagement.
Crisis Management is an on-going process.
Crisis management is an on-going process of using social listening to identify threats, use the insights to implement effective responses, use social listening to review the responses and identify new threats and so on. About loyalty recently held a webinar illustrating the effects of Covid-19 on ‘giving’ according to their current sentiment tracking research. Using the results of their sentiment tracking, they put forward a crisis timeline. It is important to track sentiment changes when individuals enter the ‘blame’ stage. You can recognised as a hero or villain, so this is a time to manage your online reputation vigilantly.
Image source: https://www.about-loyalty.com/
To put this into context, Radius Data Exchange released an article which states “Hero or villain actions will be remembered.” One example of a ‘hero’ in the article is John Lewis Partnership’s million-pound community support fund. In contrast, villains were also mentioned too, for instance, when Wetherspoon’s told employees it would stop pay, there was an outcry online.
