Social Media Disaster Management

Social media provides a direct exposure to the masses and potential customers for a business. Social media involvement helps businesses to stimulate a more personal touch to their business relationship. However, it is seen many times that while trying set up social media presence with flying colors, businesses often encounter hampered brand image in market. These potentially negative results cite a fear of branding over social media and limit the willingness of businesses to venture freely. There are a number of reasons for these negative results or social media disaster:

• Hate communities or blogs which serve the purpose of defaming a business or organization. Such activities leave a negative impact and can influence people’s thoughts.
• Poor performance of a product in user’s perspective. Quality issues in product hamper the image of a business.
• Publicly revelation of internal and confidential information or conflicts of a business. Rumors do the same to paint black on reputation.

There is always bad associated with the good and so we cannot expect all the people to like the social media presence of a business. There would always be a group of people trying to disrespect a brand. In order to come through these social media disasters, a proper social media disaster management plan should be drafted with a series of steps:

• Monitor the activities and patterns over social media. Number of social media monitoring and listening tools developed with custom software development for each platform is available for administrators to find out what is being discussed. This helps identifying the crisis and regular monitoring even helps to deal and avoid such circumstances.
• Try to identify the epicenter of such crisis. Try to explore the group of people talking about it, particular location at which topic is discussed on, how it is affecting the image of organization and how that group of people or location is related to your organization.
• Plan a communication strategy with the people linked directly or indirectly with the business or business process. Spread the information about the rumors or how the presented content is complexly presented and modulated against the reputation of business. The communication plan should involve senior management, public relation officer to authenticate this communication strategy.
• Customize the information to be distributed according to the customer base or user base in which the information is to be imparted and to suit the platform need.

Deploying crisis management plan in social media marketing results in controlled negative comments and more positive discussions at the end of disaster management plan. However, all this depends on if target audience is happy or satisfied with the performance and efforts of a business.