You want to know how to protect your brand’s reputation during a communication crisis but you, unfortunately, missed A Data Pro’s webinar titled “The Way Media Intelligence Helps You Survive A Crisis”?
Don’t worry, we got you covered!
If you’d like to know all the tips we shared during the live session, you can go ahead and watch the entire webinar on demand. Philip Manev (Account Manager | Media Intelligence at A Data Pro), Dilek Asanoska (Senior analyst at A Data Pro), and Jenia Gutzova (Managing Director at Perceptica) covered the role of media intelligence in Crisis Communication and the importance of media measurement during a crisis with the assistance of Anna Tsenova (Marketing Manager at Updata One).
If you are interested in the most important takeaways from the webinar, keep on reading! But first:
How do we define a communication crisis?
A crisis is any potential or ongoing threat to a brand’s reputation. There is a wide variety of potential crises such as extreme weather, cyber attacks, business malpractice, product recalls or bad product/service reviews, brand reputation threats, etc. Any coverage that does not align with how you want your brand to be perceived by the public has the potential of turning into a crisis.
Here are the 6 ways media intelligence can help you during the crisis:
1. Timely media monitoring reveals potential and existing sources of conflict
Sometimes it’s easy to spot a crisis because most media coverage will be overtly negative. However, there are a lot of times when conversations are nuanced and you need to monitor them for a longer period to produce a more accurate analysis of what direction these conversations will take. Media monitoring can help you understand what events triggered a crisis or what conversations online have the potential to turn into a crisis. You will know that you are heading towards a crisis when these negative conversations start to multiply and gain traction.
2. Media monitoring can help you gauge the effectiveness of your crisis management efforts
Monitoring media in real-time, or, in the case of a potential crisis, ahead of time, can help you adjust your messaging and properly address criticism to minimize the negative impact on your reputation. Media monitoring is not only used to alert you of a crisis. It also helps you assess the effectiveness of your crisis team’s efforts. That means assessing whether the negative coverage is decreasing and, hopefully, turning into positive coverage, or whether it’s causing more friction. Moreover, monitoring what your competitors are doing and how their actions are received by online audiences is paramount. By doing so, you can shape your crisis communications to minimize damage caused by online outrage as well as find alternative solutions to problems.
3. Media Intelligence timely informs you when negative coverage surfaces online
PR professionals need to be the first people to know when negative coverage surfaces online. That means getting an alert in the form of a notification or an email when things start brewing online. It’s not ideal for PR professionals to find out about negative coverage after it all blows up. This is where timely media monitoring jumps into action.
Social listening platforms can be used for automated alert monitoring which picks mentions based on specific criteria. For example, these alerts can be customized to alert you when someone mentions your brand in co-occurrence with words such as “bad”, “criminal”, “injury”, “product recall”, “bad service”, “sucks”, “stocks fell”, or any keywords that may cause concerns.
4. Media Intelligence metrics give answers to the 5 W’s and H questions
Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? – Media intelligence has answers for everything!
Social listening platforms put a variety of metrics at your disposal. They give you access to all types of mentions in one place including social media, traditional media (TV & radio coverage included), owned media, blogs, podcasts, forums, etc. This enables you to:
- Conduct a media breakdown
- Look at languages and geographical positioning
- Do a sentiment analysis and emotional breakdown
It’s important to mention that just looking at a social listening tool is not enough. You have to know what you are looking for and what you are looking at, otherwise, you might miss something that will ultimately harm your brand’s reputation. This is where a team of experienced analysts comes into play. Language and context matter because you have to treat each market individually. Some messages that work for the English market, for example, might not work for the Spanish market. That’s why it’s important to have multilingual teams delivering these insights to PR professionals.
5. Media intelligence helps you understand the landscape you are operating in
We are living in a very dynamic environment where everything changes fast, especially in the local market. The most common mistake companies make is not keeping an eye on all the changes that are happening. You have to know very well the landscape you are operating in – the business challenges, the competitors, and, most importantly, your audience. In the last decade, social media turned out to be the most powerful tool for customers all over the world. This means that companies have to monitor all social media channels extremely closely as sometimes it takes minutes for a crisis to emerge. Using the best media monitoring tools at hand is the first step to always being up to date with the latest news.
6. Media monitoring can help you prevent one of the most common mistakes brands make
When a crisis hits, there are a lot of things that go wrong. One of the most common mistakes is not responding to the crisis at all. Many companies still believe it would be better to delete a post and pretend that nothing happened. Ignoring the crisis or deleting comments on social media doesn’t make it go away. Many times, brand employees make the mistake of arguing on social media with customers that shared negative reviews or comments. This is unacceptable and counterproductive. Media intelligence gives you a broader view of what the audiences are concerned or angered about. It also gives you the ability to receive frequent updates on how sentiment and emotions change towards your brand as time passes. This helps you gauge whether your crisis management efforts are producing the desired results.
Best practices for crisis management:
Productive media monitoring during a crisis is heavily dependent on two things:
- A good media monitoring tool that provides all of these metrics and more;
- Analysts who are familiar with the languages and markets.
Crises can be very different, and each has its unique challenges. Here are some of the best practices:
- Be informed and act fast. If you get the first few hours of your crisis response wrong, it will be almost impossible to recover without reputational damage. How you react in the first few hours sets the tone for the entire response.
- Be honest and admit that you made a mistake. Own up to it.
- Keep your stakeholders informed.
- Be transparent, take actions to prevent this crisis from happening again, and inform people how you’ll do this.
- Ensure that the messages you produce calm down audiences rather than inflaming the situation.
Are you interested in monitoring online mentions about your brand?
A Data Pro’s teams provide flexible solutions to brands that include hourly-based conversation reports as well as comprehensive analysis reports based on quantitative and qualitative data. PR professionals need to get regular updates that will evaluate the progress of the crisis and the effectiveness of their response. Contact us for more information on how we can help you safeguard your brand’s reputation!
Watch the full webinar recording on demand:
