Twitter is a great way for companies
of all sizes to extinguish any crises that may have erupted or that may be
brewing. While individual brands do it quite well, it is the bigger
organizations that need to take notes. Individuals like Chetan Bhagat and Kiruba
Shankar have at multiple times used twitter very well to silence the
crises-in-brewing.When it comes to social media understanding and awareness, big organizations, on an average, would have taken nascent steps and established a social media team/ department or atleast hired some 'expert'. But by the nature of a big organization, these marketing, communication, social media etc. teams often work in silos, which clogs a possible thought pipeline that could have existed among these teams to advise them on using Twitter as a means of managing any media crisis.
For example, if tomorrow a lesser known blog was to report that [hypothetically] Samsung isn't going to launch their 10'inch tab in India or they're only going to make phones with Windows Phone 7 & since they're pissed with the Google-Motorola alliance; the news would gradually but surely spread.
[Working
on the assumption that such a rumor is genuinely not true for the moment] In
such a case, the company would obviously first create an official statement.
[and during the time taken to create this.. getting approvals etc. the news
would have further spread out.] Once the statement is ready, instead of waiting
for the next query to issue the official statement, companies should do the
following:
- Tweet about the same from
the company twitter handle, marking the bloggers who may have posted the news
- get some online influential
people internal to the company [or amongst it's creative/ PR etc. agencies] to
retweet the same
-
Post the official statement, with a spokesperson's name and email id, in the
comments stream of the blog that started the rumor
- Post
the official statement, with a spokesperson's name and email id, on other
influential blogs/ online portals that may have picked the news
These
simple 4 steps would be sufficient to contain the rumor from spreading further
and would help in totally extinguishing it as well. Twitter is this simple
enjoyable tool that can be put to great effect, but big companies often
forget.
[I
do not mention small companies in my post, since by their very nature they are
forced to resort to these tools because of the lack of other resources. Also,
again by their very nature the team size is smaller and hence it facilitates
easy coordination.]
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