Chris Norton: 0:04

Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps you learn from the fails and missteps of the world's top marketers. I'm Chris Norton and my mission is to arm you, the senior marketer, with the tools, strategies and hard-earned lessons you need to grow your brand, protect its reputation and ultimately hit record-breaking revenues. This week, we're looking at one of the recent sold-out events and tackling a topic that every marketer and board director fears but must be ready for how do you protect your brand when a crisis strikes? Whether it's a viral backlash, a data breach or a PR nightmare, knowing how to act decisively could be the difference between surviving and thriving. We'll explore questions like are your crisis plans built for today's social first world? How do you turn a public blunder into an opportunity for growth, and what do brands like Boeing, Bud Light and the BBC teach us about the do's and don'ts of crisis management?

Chris Norton: 0:57

This episode looks at practical strategies like how to monitor social conversations in real time, when to engage or stay silent, and why empathy might just be your secret weapon. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's hear how you can safeguard your brand's reputation even in the eye of the storm. Enjoy. Thank you for joining us. Today is on crisis management. We're going to be looking at navigating challenges in PR and marketing. Thanks for joining us.

Will Ockenden: 1:31

Crisis management is quite an interesting one, because the nature of crisis management is that almost always we have to sign an NDA when we're dealing with a crisis. So we can't talk about case studies per se, but we will be drawing on anonymized client examples throughout.

Chris Norton: 1:48

Today's session is about helping you to minimize damage in a crisis scenario. It's about reducing the impact on your brand and your brand's reputation, because reputation is the most important thing. It always amazes me when people think that public relations is a small part. They think of it as media relations, and actually, crisis management is when your PR person, your PR agents or yourself, if you work in-house in the PR bit, is when reputation is what it's all about. And if a crisis kicks off, trust me, it has a big, big impact. We're going to look at ensuring your crisis planning is fit for purpose in a social world Well, social media first world. Also, in an AI first world as well. There's a lot of changing technologies and you've got to make sure that you've updated your social media strategy, that is, and your crisis plan as well. So in the next 60 minutes we're going to go, we're going to bring your crisis plan up to date, ready for 2024 and beyond, hopefully. So what will you get from the next hour in this session then? Well, I'm going to look at the context into why crisis planning is so important for brands and some of the latest statistics on that. We'll get insight into the evolving crisis curveballs presented by social media, which is why I've been doing social media crisis management for near on 10 years. I actually wrote the CIPR's section in the CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations have a handbook and I wrote a section on online crisis management because basically there wasn't a framework for how to deal with online crises, social media crises, and I wrote all that section for them. So I've been doing it, and that was about eight years ago or something. We're going to look at some case studies into who's got it right and who's got it wrong. Not everyone gets it right and not everyone gets it totally wrong. A crisis can actually be a good thing, sometimes to clear the decks. Weirdly enough. Crisis can actually be a good thing sometimes to clear the decks, weirdly enough. And then Will's going to talk about how to get guidance into creating a social first crisis plan for this year and beyond. We're going to show you some examples of how you can do that. And then a little bit on further help and support if you need it in any which way, shape or form.

Chris Norton: 4:03

So let's define crisis communication If we use AI. This is what it's spitting out today, rather than a body description. This is what ChatGPT says so. It says crisis communication is a strategic way to manage and share information during a crisis or critical event. The goal is to minimize damage, maintain public trust and guide appropriate responses. Pretty accurate, as you would expect.

Chris Norton: 4:29

So why the hell should you care Like? Why are you sat there now thinking? Why did you sign up to a webinar about crisis management? Why are you interested in it? What is the thing that's making you care about it?

Chris Norton: 4:40

Well, the cost of failing to prepare or deal with a crisis. For businesses, it can be up to 36% of turnover for failing to deal with a crisis. It can ruin companies and has done. We only have to look at a business like Ratner's. Many, many years ago, when I started out in PR, ratner said made a big claim at a conference and it wasn't even. He didn't do a press statement or anything like that. He just said at a conference most of our stuff is shit, and it got taken out as a direct quote that stuff that they sold was shit and within two years the business was pretty much finished.

Chris Norton: 5:18

But today, the amount of time board members said it took to fully recover from a crisis, according to Deloitte, is between one and five years. So if you haven't prepared for one, that's why you're here, because it can take up to five years to recover from a crisis. Some businesses never do, so it's an interesting question, but if it's a proper existential crisis, it can really smash a business to pieces. Reputation is everything. It takes years and years to build the trust, but it can take seconds to destroy all that trust and ruin your business. So Experian said that 78% of business leaders say that they've experienced some kind of crisis in the past 18 months.

Chris Norton: 5:59

I'm going to talk about some of the crises that could occur as well, and, according to Forbes, 50% don't have a company-wide crisis plan in place. That's one of the questions in the polls I believe that Will's put in there is do you have a crisis plan in place? If you don't, you should have some sort of crisis plan in place. Anything is better than nothing. To start, 78% of people most frequent crisis that, yeah. So these are the most popular crises that we're seeing, and Will and I have just been talking about this recently.

Chris Norton: 6:35

So data breach of consumer information so somebody's got into your data and released it. A product recall, which maybe you'll see that with several cars, some of the electric vehicles. There's been product recalls, a cyber attack 74% or a ransomware attack 73%. Those two at the end a cyber attack and a ransomware attack. I was speaking to an IT specialist yesterday and they've seen a 40% increase in cyber attacks on businesses. It is massive and he was telling me that he didn't tell me the client's name, but the client had everything in the cloud Microsoft Office and it cost the client more than £8,000 in damage just to repair what had been done. But this particular business had been hacked and all these emails had been sent to everybody in their database, every single contact and every single person in the business. It just mass spammed. More importantly, not just the 8,000 pounds to recover the business and lock it down, it was actually the damage to customer reputation. All the customers just thought the business was completely out of control.

Chris Norton: 7:48

But that is a growing area, so crisis can come from anywhere non-controllable to me and you. So what is the payoff of getting it right? There's quite a lot of payoffs of getting it right. Rebuilding trust with customers is what I was just talking about. A minute ago, customers said the most positive response to a crisis would be continue to be a customer, so 46% will continue to be a customer. That is good after a crisis, and you can have a stronger reputation after a crisis.

Chris Norton: 8:18

Working in PR, I've done several sessions on this. We do full-day training sessions with clients and we use multiple examples of when businesses have gone through a crisis, the response, how they've dealt with it and then the recovery, and sometimes brands come out of it stronger. So the biggest positive response was that 43% of people would think favorably of the organization after the crisis, or 31% would recommend the business still after the crisis, and 16% of people would post about it positively, not negatively, obviously on social. So crisis management really matters. It protects your reputation. It protects your brand values. It can minimize and it will do, if it's dealt with properly financial losses the £8,000 and the reputational loss I just talked about as an example. It ensures business continuity.

Chris Norton: 9:14

So if you've got a decent plan in place, you know what to do. You've run through the scenarios. Scenario training is a big thing as well, because having a sheet of paper doesn't mean that you've got a plan in place. What about scenarios? You've run scenarios in, such as a twitter outbreak, etc. Etc. There's loads of different things you can do that make it really specific to your business and to make sure that the people that are there ready know how to speak and how to deal with certain situations. And it's safeguards stakeholder relationships. So make sure that you've got stronger relationships afterwards. It demonstrates leadership and accountability.

Chris Norton: 9:48

If you own a crisis and look like you are managing it, you're investigating it. You show leadership and accountability. Ok, they're investigating it. There's been several businesses that I've known and there was, right back in the day, there was somebody in the press office. I was talking to the head of media relations at a business that I knew and their phone was ringing off the hook, off the hook, off the hook, off the hook. It was a national story, it was breaking, and they decided the head of media relations just said look, stop answering, issue a statement. We'll issue a statement at 4 o'clock and then that's when we'll release your statement. And they took control because the journalists were just ringing them and ringing them, and ringing them and you see this on social now, where you just get question after question so they said we're going to release a statement after four, then just stopped answering the phones till four o'clock when they released a new statement saying we've investigated this. This is what we're doing now and we'll release another statement at nine, eight, ten am next day Taking control, demonstrating leadership of you, owning the situation, showing accountability.

Chris Norton: 10:49

Turn threats into opportunities for growth. I mean that's a big thing. So maybe something's gone wrong. You see this with product launches all the time, and a crisis will come from a product launch and then they turn it into something where they can grow. The brand I've got a couple of examples in a minute of bad crises and one of a couple of good ones as well Prepares organizations for future challenges.

Chris Norton: 11:12

So, if you've got a crisis plan, you've gone through your plan, you've gone through your scenario. Training your spokespeople are ready, they're media trained, you've drilled them. I mean they might not get Jeremy Paxman, but you know you're ready for it. So yeah, preparing organizations for future challenges, because you never know when one's going to happen. So is your planning fit for purpose in our social first world? And that's the question we're going to answer, and Will will put together something in a minute. He'll go through our framework of how we deal with it, with our clients.

Chris Norton: 11:46

So I was trained in PR, so I did a degree in PR. I've taught PR at university and my favorite area was crisis management. It's my specialism, and a traditional crisis is actually where PR came from. The first press release in PR came from a train crash in America in the 1800s and they didn't know how to deal with it, so the rail company issued a press statement. It was the first press release to ever be issued. That's a traditional crisis Train crashes. The media want to know what's happened. Issue a statement telling people. That feeds the media.

Chris Norton: 12:21

But we've got new things now. So a staff or a customer issue. So here you can see, there's an example here from a burger, a burger restaurant, where someone's taking a bite out of a burger before it's served, and that picture can go on social media. It can be the employee sharing it or it could be in a customer sharing it and before you know it, you've got a crisis from one of your outlets that you're not even even. They're not even in marketing or in comms, or a bland, brand-led social media crisis, such as when burger king said women belong in the kitchen, um, which broke and didn't go down so well.

Chris Norton: 12:57

So as what we're trying to say is, as well as traditional crisis scenarios, now social media can facilitate or even trigger a crisis, and actually we used to say that it sort of puts what social media can do to a crisis now is put petrol on the fire. It just basically you've got. You've got your crisis, and then you've got social, and then everybody can jump on the back of it and say aren't you a terrible organization? Because, trust me, that's what they like to do. It always feels it's get shares and engagement. So people do do that. You know what social media is like. It can be a wild west. So with that wild west, is social media a friend or a foe? What is the role of it in crisis management? So let's look at that the revolution, the evolution of a crisis online.

Chris Norton: 13:42

So we've broken this down into sort of several sections, but if you've never been involved in a crisis scenario, we've been involved in quite a few. We've been involved in stuff that you'll have seen and we've kept brands out of the media, but we've been involved in putting crises out before they even happen, before something's shared on social, and then we'll help advise a client to stop this from happening, where, within an hour, 28 percent of all crises spread within one hour and you can be damn sure I've done this for years it won't be between nine and five thirty and it won't be worse still, it probably won't be Monday to Friday either. And so you're, all your team, are out and and the crisis breaks at seven o'clock on a Sunday. Within, on average, it takes 21 hours before companies are able to create some meaningful external comms to defend themselves. So nearly a full day.

Chris Norton: 14:37

So if you have had a crisis and you've dealt with that in less than a day, with roughly a day, isn't it Twenty hours well done, because a lot of businesses take, and the longer you take, there's a vacuum. This used to happen before social. If you don't answer, you know, own that situation. Like my statement example earlier, you get this scenario where there's a vacuum. Oh, they've not answered what's going on. There must be something mysterious going on, it must be their problem, it must be their fault, and more than 48 hours in 18% of incidents. So, yeah, the crisis happens quite quickly. And then by 23, so by 12 o'clock, 69% spread internationally within 24 hours. So you can have a crisis that's broke in one of your stores or in one of your outlets and within 24 hours it's reached 11 countries, which is crazy. One year later, 53% of companies had not seen share prices regain to pre-crisis levels.

Chris Norton: 15:37

So that is what happens if you're not prepared or deal with it appropriately, you can be prepared, but if you haven't practiced or got scenario and you've run through the various and nobody ever gets it 100% right. But why do they say practice, practice, practice, because if you don't practice you ain't going to get perfect and it's never going to be perfect. Being inside a war room of a crisis can be quite fun. It can be quite scary if you're in the brand, but it can equally really get you to earn your wages. Put it that way. And 50% of communication advisors surveyed believe organizations are not adequately prepared to handle a crisis. Hence why we sometimes recommend crisis management training or some formal sort of media training or a scenario training or something with our customers or whatever.

Chris Norton: 16:27

So social media can supercharge your crisis response, because before you had to issue statements and then they had to go to the press. Now you can provide information instantly Wherever the crisis is broke. If it's broken on Twitter or X or threads or wherever it is, you can provide that information on said platform instantly. Obviously, you have to get it all If you've got agreed statements pre-approved. It also helps you can monitor evolving conversations, some of the issues that we've stopped happening. We've had things where clients have said we're going to end up in the nationals. We've monitored social media because we've got numerous monitoring tools, identified the people that are talking about it, looked at what the problems they've got, how they're mobilizing and had a pre-planned approach and then contacted the journalists that are going to attend and put out a fire before it's even happened. That's by monitoring conversations. You can't always do that. If you know something's coming, you can.

Chris Norton: 17:25

You can address concerns on social media because misinformation is happening all the time. During COVID we've had various people on our podcasts. We're getting the guy that. We've had somebody that was involved in the COVID war room and misinformation was happening. Like they had at least 65 social media posts that were misinformation every single day during COVID, one of which was drink.

Chris Norton: 17:48

You might remember this one. There's loads. You remember when Donald Trump said drink bleach, which was insane. And then there was another one in the UK that the government did have to respond to and that was if you drink boiling hot water, it kills the virus in your stomach. That was when that was peak COVID and the government had to do a response so you can address concerns, misinformation. Equally, if you're using social media, you can limit the damage, you can monitor, respond and also you can demonstrate transparency by saying we're investigating this. This is where we're at so far. We'll do X, y and Z. We're investigating, don't worry, we've got this.

Chris Norton: 18:29

So let's take a look at some real world crisis examples and hopefully the sound will work on this. So let's just talk about this. So we've got Boeing here Now. I mean we've put here. It's an absolute masterclass in mishandling a crisis. Boeing 737. I mean, boeing have been an interesting case study for crisis management. They spend millions on it.

Chris Norton: 18:54

But this year just keeps getting worse for Boeing More FAA investigators, more whistleblowers and delays in its new Starliner, which is its space vehicle. Whistleblowers and delays in its new Starliner, which is its space vehicle. That's been delayed Terrible PR. Also, you have the 737 MAX where two planes under the new software flew directly into the ground due to software malfunction. Boeing denied it was a malfunction, then had to admit it was and then they had to admit the training. Allegedly the training wasn't provided appropriately for the captains and then so that had all gone on. Boeing stock is down 29%, almost a third this year, making it one of the worst performing stocks in the US stock exchange. The company is currently having to borrow nearly 10 billion trying to fix its problems. And then, on top of all that, this video appeared on social media, which you'll have seen. It was one video, but I mean. You know what I'm saying about trust. It takes years and years, and years. Good quality building planes, the engines are reliable. Then this appears on social media.

: 20:01

We are following a developing story. After part of an Alaska Airlines plane fell off mid-flight, the FAA is now grounding 171 Boeing 737 MAX 9s as investigators try to figure out how this happened and if it's a bigger problem. Abc's Rena Roy has the latest New video from inside this 737 MAX 9 shows federal investigators combing through the plane as they work to figure out what went wrong when the door plug flew off midair during an Alaska Airlines flight on Friday, leaving a gaping hole. I looked to my left and there's this huge chunk part of the airplane just like missing. The door plug now found after a three-day search. It ended up in the backyard of a Portland school teacher. The discovery coming as the National Transportation Safety Board reveals, no data can be pulled from the cockpit voice recorder because it was completely overwritten At two hours. It re-records over it, so we have nothing from the CVR.

: 21:31

171 Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes now grounded around the world. We are emergency, we are depressurized, but we do need to return back the plane taking off from Portland, oregon, friday evening, heading to Ontario, california, with 179 people on board when all of a sudden, the so-called door plug, which is used to cover and seal optional emergency exits flew off from the 26th row. Thankfully the two seats next to it were empty. The plane depressurizing. I was really praying. I was asking God to put angels under the wings to hold us up. Some passengers' phones sucked out of the plane, flight attendants racing to keep everyone calm and safe. I just noticed one flight attendant rushing down the aisle with a portable oxygen mask. She was just trying to do a head count. Make sure everybody was counted for, the pilot immediately heading back to Portland International Airport. The entire ordeal lasting 26 minutes.

: 22:26

I mean the NTSB says.

Chris Norton: 22:28

I mean I won't share the rest of that video, but the point is, I mean, imagine if there had been two people sat in those chairs. Had they survived if they'd not been strapped that way? Seat belt is the first message to this um, but boeing, I mean to add to this, obviously they've had two planes crashed straight into the ground killing several hundred people, which is absolutely horrific. Um and the ceo, um, I believe and I don't know the exact numbers, so don't quote me on this but is hundreds of millions.

Chris Norton: 22:58

His salary is, and he got pulled in front of the American committee to answer questions on build quality on Boeing planes and the, the, the, the various senators that were grilling him were saying basically, you're, you're using profit. Him was saying basically, you're, you're using profit, you're, you're taking out profit of the business just to make more profit for your shareholders at the risk of safety to passengers. So I mean it's literally awful and all bowen keep doing is issuing more defensive statements. But now they've had to um, admit some things with the issues with the, the software and etc. Etc.

Will Ockenden: 23:30

Because there's been formal investigations into it but yeah, I, yeah, and for me, one of the you know, 15, 20 years ago, if that had happened on a plane, chances are nobody would have been there to film it. But the challenge we face now is you know, something like that happens, or indeed something quite minor. You know, and it might be. You know, it might be a minor product defect or it might be a member of staff misbehaving, but rest assured, there's always somebody there with their smartphone to record it, and that can absolutely create a whole new dynamic when it comes to crisis scenarios.

Chris Norton: 24:02

Yeah, but they seem to be. I mean, they're in, they're in trouble in terms of reputation, stock markets, prices down, but it's backed by the American government. So they still, you know, they're still going and they're going to continue to go, because they employ millions of people in the US. The second case study that I want to talk about is Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney. I don't know if you've heard of this story, so I'll just tell you what happened. Tiktok to promote a transgender. Dylan Mulvaney on TikTok to promote a contest. Around the same time as releasing pride, themed cans of products with various pronouns to celebrate, you know, diversity.

Chris Norton: 24:45

However, the backlash. This led to boycotts from very conservative American customers, accusing the company of being far too woke and spreading rumors that the entire marketing team had been laid off. In response, which included American musician Kid Rock shooting cans of Bud Light, people boycotted the brand. I mean it was shocking how this nearly killed Bud Light. The problem was that the response from the company was so inconsistent they didn't know which way to go, whether to say oh, they couldn't, and then they like hung out Dylan Mulvaney to try. They didn't really back what they'd done, they just said that they just totally backtracked, which was awful, really badly handled and then they didn't know what they were doing, whether they were for or against or what because they were worried that they were going to upset. So they ended up upsetting both sides of the argument, and it didn't address the concerns to come out of Mulvaney, who announced that she was scared to leave her house because of the backlash. It's a horrible story for that individual. She was really scared.

Chris Norton: 25:47

So the impact on the brand though which is why I've shared it is there's a 28% drop in sales in the month following the controversy. That's more than a quarter. Almost a third Revenue dropped by nearly $400 million, over 10% compared to the same period in the previous year. Operating profit dipped 30%. And what lessons can we take away from this? Understanding your core audience and having consistent in your crisis, because they just kept flip-flopping from one to the other. It ended up being worse that they didn't back what they'd done originally.

Chris Norton: 26:21

So, yeah, awful handling of a case today. Who got it right? Now, I know what you're thinking, gary lineker. This will be interesting. What have you got for me here, chris? Well, I'll tell you, um, but the bbc.

Chris Norton: 26:34

I'm not sure they entirely got this right because obviously what happened was Suella Braverman said that we were being invaded. You might remember she said we were being invaded. She was in the government at the time a foreign secretary, I believe, or was it Home Secretary, one of the two. She said we were being invaded by migrants to the UK and Gary Lineker responded saying good on Twitter, good heavens, this is beyond awful. And then everybody started saying he was out of order and he responded. Gary Lineker responded with this tweet this is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people, in language that is not dissimilar to that used in Germany in the 1930s and I am out of order question mark. So what happened there was they basically suspended Gary Lineker over his tweets criticising the government's immigration policy.

Chris Norton: 27:38

Now, were they right to do that? Because the BBC are meant to be impartial. So my question is this bit was probably wrong, but it led to mass walkout of several presenters and you might remember it led to the match of the day being 20 minutes long because they panicked. The BBC really backed themselves into a corner. So you'd be wondering why we've used this as an example, because actually it's a bad example. But you remember when I said you can never get it 100% right. I think that they dealt with the second part of it a lot better and they thought hang on a minute, we have got this wrong, trying to be impartial all the time.

Chris Norton: 28:11

So what did the BBC do to start rebuilding the trust? It reinstated Lineker within several days and announced a formal independent review for its impartiality rules. And how did they use their strategy to communicate to the public? There was a public apology issued by the BBC Director General, which has never been done before, and it maintained a transparent review process throughout. And what was the outcome? There was a swift return to normal programming and increased conversation around impartiality in the media, where the BBC stands. And they completely reviewed their social media policy with freelance people, because obviously Gary Lineker is freelance, he works for several, but he also works for Back to the Day, et cetera their policy, because Gary Lineker believed it was one thing, bbc believed it was another.

Chris Norton: 29:00

So the initial bit, I thought they got wrong, but I thought their way, that they did it all transparently after that was much, much better. What can we learn from this? So quick acknowledgement and a resolution of the issue is swift. That is good. A commitment to review and improve policies. If you get something wrong, there's no point in defensing the undefensible. If it's wrong, review it. And how can we improve Open communication with all stakeholders and find out the general consensus and see if there's anything you can do.

Chris Norton: 29:31

Balancing the organizational values hard for me to say with public expectations, which is what they did there, which was quite smart. So, managing a crisis in 2024, I said that traditional crisis and social media crisis were different and are now integrated, just like all types of comms. So in our crisis management process, we've got three stages of crisis management. You might have heard me talk about this. There's actually a fourth one as well, which is recovery, but for this I want to keep it nice and clear. So you've got pre-crisis how you deal with and that's why you're all here today to learn, maybe, look and review what you're doing, maybe scenario training, pre-crisisise, anything you can do to that. Then you've got during crisis and crisis response so how you dealt with how you deal with that.

Will Ockenden: 30:21

Then you've got post-crisis and how you review about 60% of you do have a crisis plan, which is great, but about 50% of you have taken actually consider social media as part of that. And then about 70% of you haven't actually faced a crisis, which is great, and long may that continue, but the chances are at some point a crisis will happen and what I'll talk about actually later on often an issue, a seemingly innocuous issue, can spiral into a crisis if it's not dealt with correctly. So let's talk about the pre-crisis stage. So this is really about kind of preparation and, like I said, the more work you can do in this kind of pre-crisis stage, the less likely you are to well, not, you know, you're always going to face crises but the less likely crises are to really develop into something more damaging. So I think, first and foremost, in the kind of pre-crisis stage, we need to be really on top of our crisis plan. Now the data suggests, as Chris talked through, about 50% of organizations don't have a crisis plan. You guys filling in the polls says about 60% do have a crisis plan, but the point is there is organizations out there without a crisis plan and, equally, even if you have got crisis plan, it might not adequately consider social media as part of that. So that's absolutely crucial and we need to. You know, we need to make sure our crisis plans are fit for purpose for the challenges we're likely to face today and like a strategy. Actually, a crisis plan needs to be reviewed regularly as well. So at least yearly, we need to review that and make sure it is up to date. Um, what we need to do as part of that is include roles and responsibilities of all the team members involved, and a crisis response as I'll explain in a minute, isn't just a comms concern. Um, it's not just a board concern. There needs to be lots of different teams inputting into that, working together, including the social team. Actually, we also need to test it out. So just having a crisis plan isn't really enough. What we need to do is stress, test that plan and check does it work when we're under pressure? Do we all know what to do? And, as part of that, what you can actually do and this is something, at prohibition, that we do with our clients. A lot is actually simulate social media crisis scenarios. So we will create a believable crisis scenario and then we will incorporate social media elements where the crisis starts to get out of control and starts to go viral on social media. And there's actually third-party companies you can work with as well that have got tools in this space that really realistically simulate a crisis going viral on social media. And the more you can work with as well that have got tools in this space that you know really realistically simulate a crisis going viral on social media, and the more you can practice it with all involved parties, then the better you're actually going to be when it comes to dealing with a crisis when it actually happens.

Will Ockenden: 33:06

I spoke about who needs to be involved in a crisis response and really you know this. This can vary depending on your organization, but definitely board and senior leadership you know they don't need to be looped in necessarily at every time you have an issue, every time you have a complaint or something like that. Typically, they get looped in when a crisis hits tipping point. You know, and that's when you loop those people in Customer service. Absolutely, Customer service are dealing with your customers and typically with complaints all the time, so they need to be briefed. Of course, marketing, comms and social need to be involved. Legal and HR might be a consideration as well as operations, and there might be other teams involved as well. But the point is, an effective crisis response involves a multidisciplinary team and everybody needs to be briefed and everyone needs to be across the plan. So on to the actual crisis response. So just to reiterate, the more robust your crisis plan in theory, the less likely a crisis is to develop into something overly damaging.

Will Ockenden: 34:14

So when you're actually in a crisis, there's four kind of key areas to take into consideration. One is the actual response, ie you know what do you do, when and how do you respond. One is messaging. So what do you actually say, you know, and what kind of key messages do you push? Communication, which is, how do you communicate with people and on what platforms, and that's a massive consideration. Actually, you know which platforms do you need to communicate on, and consistency as well, which I'll cover on the on the communication one. Actually, I'll come on to this, but you know which platform you engage with is really really important, and what we're starting to see actually is crisis scenarios developing on different platforms.

Will Ockenden: 34:57

So TikTok is something we talk about a lot, and Chris gave the brief example earlier of, you know, people in a restaurant tampering with food. Funnily enough, tiktok seems to be a really dominant channel for that kind of content. You know, and when somebody's messing around with food or something like that, typically somebody is there in the queue filming it and almost always it lands on tick tock first. So if you're in hospitality, for example, you absolutely need to be across tick tock as a channel where where these issues could develop. So on to response. So this is the first um element to consider what we need to do.

Will Ockenden: 35:33

As with all you know, this is the first element to consider what we need to do. As with all you know, this is not unique to social media crisis management, but we need to be decisive and we need to be prompt in our response by acting quickly and focusing on the facts. Even if we don't know many of the facts, we can control the narrative and what happens is in social media. If we don't respond, then we invite speculation and misinformation and what happens is a kind of a vacuum gets created where people will speculate and you know the story can quickly spiral out of control. So what we need to do, even if we don't know the full details, is acknowledge there is a problem and we are looking into it. And that's also got the second benefit of focusing debate and discussion onto our own channels. Now, it won't remove other people speculating, but it will certainly focus that chatter onto our own channels, which is a good thing because it's in one space.

Will Ockenden: 36:36

When we kind of publish this response as well as kind of traditional responses, whether that's a media statement directly to journalists, we need to think about using our own social media channels not necessarily all of our channels, though, and I'll come on to that in a moment but if a crisis, for example, breaks on Instagram or an issue breaks on Instagram, then it's really important to respond on that same channel. We don't necessarily want to respond on all of our channels, so if something happens on LinkedIn or on Instagram, there's nothing necessarily to be gained from them talking about it on TikTok, because actually that could serve to amplify the crisis beyond where it necessarily needs to go. Also, publishing a statement which can be regularly updated on your website is a really good idea, and when you're in the trenches with a crisis and you're getting as anyone probably knows, if there's been in a major crisis scenario, you might be getting 100 calls an hour from journalists, but if you have a statement on your website, you can immediately direct people to that. You can put an out of office on your emails, on the press office email address, and direct people straight to that statement, and that can just give you time to focus on how are you going to respond, rather than firefighting. And in most cases, if we act quickly, we need further time to investigate. So that's fine and we can tell people we need further time to investigate and we will be publishing a second statement at so and so o'clock. But the point is open and honest communication and getting in there early is really really In terms of messaging.

Will Ockenden: 38:05

Ideally, as part of our crisis planning, we need to first of all, anticipate the type of crises our organizations are likely to face and you're never going to guess every type of crisis. But, depending on your sector, there's going to be 10 or 20 different types of crises you could face and actually you can use AI to help anticipate some of those issues. So you could use ChatGPT, for example, to ask give me 20 crisis scenarios X company is likely to face. But the point is, you can actually prepare statements which can be finessed and bespoke according to all of those different scenarios that might occur, and ultimately they give you the basis of how to communicate with different stakeholder groups. And the point is there's massive time-saving benefits of this. When you're in the middle of a crisis, the last thing you want to be doing is spending ages and ages A responding to people's questions and B drafting comments and drafting statements. The more you can kind of automate that and the more you can take that away, the more time you can actually focus on the crisis Communication quite a broad issue here but the point is we need to understand how to communicate our response.

Will Ockenden: 39:22

Obviously, we need to get everything signed off, ideally in advance. We need to brief our team, first of all, that this is happening, and that's the immediate crisis team, and we might also want to consider broader internal comms, and there's things throughout the organization and the more robust our internal comms is, the less likely there are to be leaks. And it's not uncommon for journalists or the media to basically research employees on Twitter or on LinkedIn and actually engage with them directly and say oh, I see you work for so-and-so company. What can you tell us about this? But if you brief employees that they're not to say anything, they shouldn't respond to journalists on social media. They shouldn't speculate on their own channels. That can help lock down things from a messaging perspective as well as sort of holding statements and things like that.

Will Ockenden: 40:14

We need designated spokespeople. As with a traditional crisis, they need to be media trained, which is a whole separate sort of discipline, something we do a lot of, but you know, we could do a kind of a whole separate training deck on media training, but ultimately, they need to be able to speak clearly and confidently and with empathy as well. Actually, increasingly, the most successful spokespeople and chief executives are the ones that have empathy and connect with audiences, not just corporate robots. We also might want to consider video content as well, and increasingly what we're seeing is, if there's a major organizational crisis, the chief exec will shoot a quick video of them explaining what's happening, what the situation is, and that can be really, really effective. But again, they need to be used to being on camera and you can't just do it first time. You know, ideally you'll have trained your senior people in, you know, in shooting video content in an effective way, and I kind of mentioned this before.

Will Ockenden: 41:19

But we need to understand the appropriate channels to communicate, to always communicate on the channel where a crisis breaks. If it's a crisis, first channel, a crisis, sorry a social first crisis and we don't necessarily need to communicate on every channel because in some cases, that might amplify the crisis beyond where we. You know when it necessarily needs to go. But as part of your social strategy, you should always understand which of your audience are on which channels. So, clearly, the people that follow you on LinkedIn they're going to be a different group to the people that follow you on TikTok or Snapchat. So understand where our audiences reside and, depending on the context of the crisis, communicate on the appropriate channels. Consistency is really important as well and you know as well as kind of getting in there first with a statement. We need to regularly update our kind of customers, our stakeholders, whoever it might be, our audiences, whenever there's a kind of a changing concern or changing circumstances with a crisis.

Will Ockenden: 42:22

Now, often it's hard to understand how a crisis is evolving and really this is where social media monitoring comes in. So social media monitoring essentially allows you to track in real time and retrospectively but the real time function is most useful for a crisis how your brand is being talked about online. So how is your brand, how is your category or how is a topic you know it might be, you know it might be product recall, it might be your actual brand name, it might be a competitor. It allows you to track how that's being talked about by people in real time and, ultimately, you can track the sentiment of that conversation. You can track how, how you know the volumes of that conversation, which channels that conversation is on, and that just allows you to be super responsive and flexible in terms of how you respond and you can identify misinformation. For example, you can identify the key antagonists involved in a conversation or indeed those key positive voices that you might want to amplify as well positive voices that you might want to amplify as well.

Will Ockenden: 43:28

And actually, chris and I have been involved in a number of crises usually with retailers actually doing live events, where we've had lobbyists or protesters coordinating a protest basically against said client, which we can't talk about, and what we've actually done is identified some of those antagonists on social media and, in real time, tracked what they're doing and what they're planning and looked at how that kind of conversation is shifting and you can make real time decisions based on that and it can be incredibly effective and really, if you're not using social media monitoring during a crisis, then you know you're blind to really what's going on, and prompts and professional responses where appropriate, are really important. Now, we're not suggesting you respond to every single comment on social media. You know, if a crisis kicks off, you might be getting several hundred questions and comments every hour and there's nothing to be gained from responding to all of those. So you need to decide which of those to respond to, and that's an issue I'll talk about in a moment. And then finally, post-crisis. So, like all elements of marketing and comms, we need to measure the impact of what we've done and take the learnings and improve our plan to make us better in the future, and this allows for kind of incremental improvement. So, ultimately, this kind of post-crisis assessment, you know we need to do things like examine the effectiveness of each comms channel we used. You know. So have people been visiting the website to look at the statement? Is there a certain social network where more people came across your responses or engaged, positively or negatively? We need to measure the reach and impact of any kind of messages and refine our messaging and our approach accordingly. And again, this comes back to social listening and social insight. But using social media listening tools we can actually track the sentiment of a crisis over time and the volume of content over time about a topic, and then we can cross reference that with our crisis intervention. So, you know, we might have issued a statement refuting the claims and then the sentiment improves and this is a really useful tool to understand what you've done that has or hasn't worked. And all of this needs to go back into the crisis plan and, ultimately, every single crisis, your plan will become more robust and you'll get better at managing crises in the future.

Will Ockenden: 45:56

So we've got a few tips now on, specifically, the kind of the social media elements of handling a crisis. And, as we talked about at the beginning, yes, social media can throw fuel onto the fire of a crisis. And, as we talked about at the beginning, yes, social media can throw fuel onto the fire of a crisis, but actually social media can allow you to supercharge your crisis response. So we need to identify issues as early on as possible. So this is about really looping in the social team to your crisis management plan, and the social team's job is to really kind of become highly tuned into any kind of issue that could be contentious and could spiral out of control before it becomes a crisis. Now, typically this might be a customer complaint, it might be a negative review, it might be a photo of I don't know, you know a one of your fleet vans parked on double yellow lines. Whatever it might be, there's a number of kind of you know and ultimately intuitively they will, they will get a feel for what could spiral out of control. And typically if the person complaining is a journalist, an influencer, a blogger, that's always, you know, that's always a bit of a red flag and there's all sorts of factors that can, that can, kind of you know, that can be a red flag. Equally, if hundreds of people have responded to a comment, then that that should be escalated. But the point is, if your social team can kind of tune into these issues early, they can be dealt with before they turn into a crisis. If they're left or not identified, then they may become a crisis which could easily be avoided.

Will Ockenden: 47:36

Um, social listening I mentioned, but really you know this is about. Well, first of all, actually, social listening allows you to track mentions of your brand in real time so you can set up searches for your brand against negative keywords and when mentions kind of tip over a certain point, ie you get 10 times as many as usual, or five times as many. You get an alert so straight away. If there's a crisis happening or an issue happening, you will get an alert 24 hours a day, and again. That allows you to really be on the front foot, rather than learning about it when a journalist rings you up. But, equally, social listening just allows you to really kind of get to the heart of who's communicating, what's being said, what's the sentiment of conversation, who are the key protagonists, what platforms is the conversation taking place on? And, ultimately, this allows us to be really, really focused with our messaging, with our engagement and with engagement and with platform strategy, and it saves a huge amount of time and effort and allows us to be as focused as possible.

Will Ockenden: 48:36

We need to be empathetic when engaging with comments online, and probably more so than even when doing a media interview, and you know we we need to. We need to be open and honest and if we've made a mistake, admit we've made a mistake and we talked about this and the way things are going. We need our senior team to be also well-versed yes, in media training, of course, but they also need to be social media trained, so they need to be able to shoot an engaging video directly addressing the issue on for social media first and foremost, and and it's really important that they're kind of comfortable appearing on camera. Of course and this is a nightmare if you forget to do this if you're having a crisis and it's kicking off on social in particular, we need to make sure any kind of pre-planned campaigns are paused. So the worst thing in the world is if we're dealing with a crisis and then a campaign that you've been six months in the pipeline planning suddenly launches on social media and it can seem really, really insensitive if you do that.

Will Ockenden: 49:42

So absolutely check what social media posts are scheduled, what's happening. And there's a very famous Tesco's example when the horse meat scandal kicked off and there's basically 24 hours of terrible media coverage about Tesco's possibly selling horse meat in some of their products and they had a pre-scheduled tweet saying wow, it's been a busy day, it's time to hit the hay, which apparently was completely coincidental, but they forgot to pause it and it made it look like they were making light of the whole scandal and it completely kicked off and actually made the news. So always look at pre-scheduled posts and consider pausing campaigns. Always lock down your accounts. I mean you should change your social media passwords regularly anyway. But the worst thing is, if a crisis happens, particularly if it involves members of staff being made redundant or being fired, lock down your social accounts. And there's a really famous example when, if anyone remembers HMV which is not really a brand anymore, but when HMV had a major kind of operational reorganization, the head office, the intern, still had access to the Twitter account and was basically live tweeting the MD and the marketing director being marched off the premises and I think they sent about 50 tweets providing live commentary on who's being made redundant, as it was happening. If they had locked down the accounts before doing anything of the sort, that would not have happened.

Will Ockenden: 51:21

Internal comms is really important, of course, as with traditional crisis management, make sure we reassure people what's happening. We, we keep an open dialogue and we talk to them about what our kind of communication response is being. But also, um, you know, consider your kind of communication policies. You know, during a crisis scenario, you would ask people don't, uh, communicate on the behalf of the company on their own channels, channels, and it's those kind of things. And again, the more you can lock that down, the less likely you're going to get speculation or misinformation from staff. And, equally, that's also going to stop journalists tapping up your staff to try and comment or try and get the inside track. Knowing when to engage is really, really important, and this is a kind of a social specific challenge. But a crisis kicks off. Chances are there's going to be hundreds of people taken to social media to ask you about it, to complain, to rant, whatever it might be.

Will Ockenden: 52:20

We do need to respond to some of the questions but practically speaking, we can't respond to them all. So if you're getting 100 questions an hour, you can can't respond to them all. So if you're getting 100 questions an hour, you can't possibly respond to them all. So what we should do first of all is not get involved in arguments, of course, but you know, roughly assess influence. So aim to aim to respond to maybe one in ten is is a good idea.

Will Ockenden: 52:44

You can either respond to the main themes or topics. So if lots of people are asking the same questions, respond to one and don't respond to the rest, and you might even want to kind of pin it to the top of your profile. And, equally, if you see somebody particularly influential, if they've got a verified account or something like that. Do consider responding to them. So respond broadly to the themes and assess the influence of the people you're responding to. You might also want to kind of loop in third party information here. So if there's people who you know your partners or the media or or stakeholders or whatever who are kind of Talking the truth, arguing it from a different perspective, favorably covering the issue, you might also want to share that content, go public as soon as you can.

Will Ockenden: 53:34

You might also want to consider a crisis hub. So a crisis hub essentially is a kind of a dark site that goes live and can take over the homepage of your main website, and typically crisis hubs are used for the most severe crises. So this might be an oil spill or a plane crash or something like that. But at the very least you know we need, you know we might, you know we might want a banner or something like that or something linked on our homepage. You know giving people information about the product recall or something. But make it fairly obvious so that people know where to go, and the more clearly you can communicate on your website then the less chances are people are going to head to your social channels and create chaos there. Instead, getting a little bit technical never goes amiss.

Will Ockenden: 54:20

So if we've got a crisis scenario, it's always worth thinking what the crisis keywords are. So, so you know, is there the name of your product, the terms like product recall, the name of your brand? There'll be certain keywords that people are basically searching for online to look for details of what's happened. Now what we can do is make sure our news updates that we're publishing, that we're sending to journalists, that we're posting on social media, include those, and that can help from an SEO perspective, because the idea is your responses start to appear in search as well as perhaps the negative pieces. We can also look at Google PPC bidding for those keywords. So if somebody's searching for XXX, product recall, our content comes up on PPC with our side of the argument, and the whole point is we want to redress the balance.

Will Ockenden: 55:12

So it's not just all negative, actually. Here's the facts from our perspective. And equally, it's not uncommon to use what we call bash tags, where people might say hashtag my Dell hell being one of the famous ones or company name fail. We can also use those hashtags, because if people are using those hashtags to search for information about what's happened, we should also use them in our content and our content will start to show up in those hashtag searches as well. And again, it's about redressing the balance. And finally and this might be something probably post-crisis in the longer term, but ideally we'll have social media allies, and these might be stakeholders, partners, it might be influencers we've worked with, you know, and this is a chance to kind of, you know, like retweet or link to favorable content that perhaps presents the argument from a different perspective. Or, equally, in the longer term, you know, start to use influencers to tell the good stories you know about what's happening. And again, this is about balancing things out online so there's not just pages and pages of negative content about our company negative content about our company. Okay, that's a whistle-stop tour, just so you know.

Will Ockenden: 56:33

You know when Chris and I deliver crisis strategy and crisis training, of which we do an awful lot of, it can take many days. You know, drafting a crisis plan is a fairly in-depth process. You know, what we've done here in about 50 minutes is kind of giving you a whistle-stop tour of what you need to take into consideration. You will face challenges on the way, unfortunately, and we're just being realistic. You know, one of the big challenges we hear clients telling us about and brands telling us about is meaningfully and effectively integrating social into a traditional crisis plan. I think it's quite easy to superficially incorporate social media into a crisis plan, but doing it in a way where everything is joined up and everything is integrated does require some real consideration and brainpower.

Will Ockenden: 57:19

Tracking a crisis when it starts to go viral is a challenge, and that's the importance of kind of stress. Testing your crisis plan and doing scenario testing as well and you know how you respond when it goes live, if you like, and it starts going viral is crucially important. Identifying issues early, before they turn into a crisis is another challenge and, like we said, you know, often what happens is a customer complaint just isn't dealt with on social media and suddenly it's the weekend and it's a bank holiday and three days later there's a thousand comments and the journalists are looking at this and ringing you up and asking what's happened. If that had been dealt with in the first instance, before it spiraled out of control, then it might not have become such a big issue. Setting the right tone when it comes to messaging and knowing when to engage with the right people at the right time is also a challenge. So, with so much happening in a crisis responding to journalists, internal comms, responding on social media it's really hard to know how to focus your time and effort and it's really important to understand. Okay, let's respond only to the most influential antagonists on social media that have got the potential to to influence how the crisis evolves.

Will Ockenden: 58:35

So you'll be pleased to know we do have various crisis products. I'm not going to speak for ages about these, but we can help you in your crisis journey. So we have what we call the social first crisis plan, and really our point is here. If you think about a crisis and the fact that you know, for companies with a turnover of less than 10 million, a serious crisis could cost them 36% of their turnover and you know, can you afford a loss equal to that? Now, an effective comms social first crisis plan can help you reduce the impact of a crisis. Now, essentially, it's a crisis order and risk mapping exercise.

Will Ockenden: 59:19

So we look at the types of crises or risks that you're likely to face as an organisation. It's consultancy around bringing your crisis plan up to speed with the challenges we face in 2024 and beyond. So it's making your crisis plan social first, and then it's bedding that in with the necessary stakeholders. So we talked about HR and customer service and the board. So there's a half-day training and there's also live scenario testing.

Will Ockenden: 59:44

So we not only create the crisis plan, we actually test it and stress test it. So you will come out of that process with an incredibly robust social media crisis plan that should and you know, and will in fact protect you in the future. Now, our rate card for that is five thousand five hundred pounds, but we are doing a webinar offer, limited time, for 5,000, 4,999, 5,000 pounds for that. So if you're interested in that or you'd like to know more about that, do let us know. That's the sales bit over, don't worry. So, businesses with an effective crisis plan if we're breaking this down, breaking down 60 slides into one key lesson they're more likely to bounce back faster, with less damage to their profits and reputation. View it like an insurance policy the more prepared you are, the less damage you are likely to face.

Chris Norton: 1:00:40

Thanks, guys. We'll be sure to see you soon. So thanks very much, and we'll catch you later. Enjoy the rest of your day.