Crisis communication and social media

Crisis communication is a PR function. It is the management and effort made to communicate when an unexpected event occur that have negative impact on reputation. Crisis communication is an initiative which aim at protect the reputation and maintain public image. In many times,  it involves tools like press conference, media relations and social media. 

Today, there is up to 2 billion user on social media all over the world. It is important to look after and take care your reputation online. Now, there is many organizations use social media to carry out an effective crisis communication plan. They made communication as soon as possible in a crisis, typically within few hours after the crisis happen. This allow them to handle and control the disseminated about the crisis that had happen. The organizations should stick with the facts in timeliness. I will provide an example :

Other than the two image above, Southwest has more responding appropriate to the crisis through social media and plan well for their crisis communication. They have place a plan with clear roles to who they need response immediately. 

New Media Planning

Today's topic is about the steps and elements for the new media plan. So there are several steps and elements to prepare a new media plan.

 The first step is to set the objective for your new media plan. It is very important to have an objective because without objectives, you will be wasting your time and effort for doing something that has no direction.

Second step, define and analyze the target audience which could be internal stake holders (e.g. employees) and external stake holders (e.g. consumers). Indirectly, an appropriate platform also need to be consider at this time in order to reach your target audience effectively.

Next, after setting the objectives, defined the target audience and choose the appropriate platform, you need to plan a calendar, you need to do a Gantt chart for listing down all the details list of what activities will be conduct so that you will not mess up everything.

Next step, you need to do a sample of your planning to have an actual idea how the activities is being conduct and how is the out come of the activities. In addition, you may have to do a prediction on your new media plan to predict whether the outcome meet your objectives.

Lastly, you need to evaluate your new media plan. You can evaluate it by interview, questionnaire and etc to seek for feedback and find out whether that your plan is successful or not. If the feedback is good you may keep going on your new media plan, if it is bad you may do some changes in your new media plan.

In my group assignment, we are also doing the new media plan for a particular company that distribute to us. We also set a clear objective for our assignment to have a direction what we should plan. For the target audience, we decide to target both internal and external stakeholders. Now, we are proceeding to the follows step to complete our new media plan.

Handling Online Feedback, Reviews and Dissatisfaction

A good reputation is vital for a company. The Internet now is popular platform for the customer to express their dissatisfaction. Nowadays, there are many customers researching a business online, a bad online review or feedback can be some serious damage towards a company's reputation. Therefore, dealing with online review is very important.

So, when you receive a bad online review, there is a tips to guide you what not to do and what to do.

What Not To Do When Receive a Bad Online Review

• Do nothing and ignore the post
• Argue with the reviewer
• Deny the problem exists

What To Do When Receive a Bad Online Review

• Apologize in good manner
• Reply timely as soon as you could
• Provide solution to solve their dissatisfaction
• Reasonable compensation based on the situation if needed

Now, lets take a look on a real life example of how to handle online review.

The image above shows that a customer posted a feedback in Chinese on his own Facebook profile and was re-posted by another people on Nando's Facebook page. The post is talking about one of the Nando's restaurant in Malaysia was reserved for the Muslim breaking fast on the dining time and the Chinese can only enter the restaurant after 8pm. This review has bring up the racist issue from Nando's.

Regarding this dissatisfaction from their customers, Nando's has made a quick response. In the post, Nando's thanks the reviewer bring up the issue to them and state there is no race discrimination in Nando's. Nando's clearly explain that how the restaurant reservation work and the reservation is for all customers. They apologize as well.