Crisis communications in the Twitter age
You're midway through a successful launch when a flaw comes to light: Your product can be made to burst into flames. It only happens in the unlikeliest of scenarios, and no actual consumer incidents have been reported, but none of that matters right now. Here's what does: A video has begun circulating. It's dramatic, funny, and deeply humiliating for your company and your brand.
Over the next 24 hours, the video -- now titled "Deadly Fail!" -- will go viral. Twitter, YouTube, even your personal Facebook feed -- there'll be no escaping it. Your company page will snowball with jokes, complaints, and increasingly angry demands for a response, and panicked calls from product marketing personnel, retail partners, and investors will pour in. Already, the knives are out at Mashable, and Keyboard Cat is cracking his knuckles to accompany you on the homepages of Digg and BuzzFeed.
What do you do now?
Thanks to social media, bad news now travels at the speed of light through exponentially increasing channels, and a spark can become a firestorm in the time it takes to explain the situation to your boss. How do you keep a million posts and retweets from doing irreparable damage to your brand? Simply repeating the same canned statements through every available channel will only bring further criticism and mockery. There's only one way: You must fight social media with social media.
In this article, I'll show you how.
