Social media crisis management..

[William Dobbs]

As social media specialists, what basic crisis management techniques have you created or put in place for present clients if they run into problems or community negativity issues?

[Maggie McGary]

I think it's important to have a triage plan in place in general, but also specific to any hot issues that you anticipate might generate negative feedback. Identifying which individuals are equipped to answer specific questions or deal with certain topics, making sure ahead of time that they know that if called upon they will need to respond in a timely manner and in the appropriate tone for whatever medium (e.g. blog post, discussion item, etc), and also making sure that those people understand why it's important to respond and not just freak out and delete the whole comment thread or whatever the case may be. I think it's also important to educate the entire staff of a given organization about what social media is, why it's important to monitor and respond when approrpriate, etc.

[chuff80]

It's a good question. My company recently had an issue where a competitor was comment spamming one of our social media pages. Normally I wouldn't delete a whole comment stream, but since these were spam comments I just deleted them. I wish there was a better way, but in this case they just kept doing it.

[William Dobbs]

It is great you thought about your actions before taking action! I run into alot of businesses or IT people who would delete the thread and move on. They would never address the issue or question.