Leaked memo got you down?
A blogger has just said something bad about your company and it's getting picked up and repeated by others rapidly online … what do you do?
One of the toughest things to understand about responding to a negative situation on blogs is the speed with which the conversations happen. Speed matters because in a matter of minutes, content can go viral and not responding early means that your voice is missing in the crucial early discourse — and therefore not represented as the conversation is carried forward.
Aside from that, if you do not respond quickly, you give others a chance to respond for you — and perhaps not favorably. So how do you deal with a negative blog situation if one does arise, and do it quickly?*
Here are a few tips:
Identify the participants. Every blog crisis has three categories of participants: the source, the commenters and the promoters. The source is the place where the story started, the commenters are those discussing it, and the promoters are the people spreading the story online. By far the easiest way to build a picture of these people is to simply follow links: visit the original site, click on "About" pages, click on people’s name in blog comments and keep a list of these people.
Evaluate the conversation. In addition to tone of comments (are they positive or negative?), look for frequency, how many different people are commenting, and the date and time of last comment to see how active and wide-reaching the conversation is. Going beyond blogs, read the "backchannel" of conversation by identifying your keywords and the source blogger on Twitter Search. Often bloggers will offer a running commentary through Twitter, giving you vital background information and possibly even a way to engage the blogger in a real-time discussion.
Respond authentically. On blogs, as opposed to other less immediate and personal forms of media, you cannot rely on a carefully-crafted press release to create ambiguity or delicately respond to a crisis. You need to have a point of view and share it authentically. This may be an apology, a promise to investigate further, or a correction of fact. Doing it authentically means you must also have a real person comment (not an anonymous company account).
Publish your point of view. Simply commenting, however, is not the most powerful way to respond to a negative situation. The best way is to publish your point of view on some form of social media that is an asset for your company. Publish something on your own corporate blog (if you have one). Then every comment or subsequent discussion can point people back to this content, and even bring the conversation about the issue onto your site.
Monitor and respond to conversation. The most challenging thing about responding to a blog crisis is that you need to keep monitoring the conversation and responding to commentary and dialogue. At some point, it will usually die down … but in social media and on blogs you need to follow through on any conversations you have started, or else risk undoing any positive work you may have done as people feel you are not paying attention to them.
* As you may have realized, this post assumes that you will be responding to a blogger in the first place. There are some very real situations where we have counseled clients NOT to respond to particular blog attacks and where I personally have chosen not to respond to bloggers that may have posted negatively about me. Unfortunately, there is no hard rule for when to respond or when not to as each situation is different.
In addition to this approach, there are several tools that can help you manage a crisis. Below is a list of free ones to use (in addition to any monitoring software your company may be using):
1. Google Alerts - Simple and dependable. If you are monitoring an ongoing situation, set up alerts with Google to get automatic emails as soon as a set combination of terms is mentioned.
2. RSS Feeds - Set up an RSS feed reader account and subscribe to the blogs that are part of the dialogue.
3. Twitter Search - Search keywords, brand mentions or tweets from particular bloggers and individuals involved in the discussion.
4. Google Blogsearch - Get the URL of the original post and enter it into this tool to see who else is linking to it and talking about it.
5. Cocomment - After you comment on a blog post, save it on this site and you can easily check to see who has posted a comment after yours, and whether you should respond.
del.icio.us - Keep a private tagged list of all the blogs who are mentioning the crisis and share notes with colleagues on any interactions you have had with them.
6. del.icio.us - Keep a private tagged list of all the blogs who are mentioning the crisis and share notes with colleagues on any interactions you have had with them.
This MarketingVOX How-To was written by Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. It first appeared on Ogilvy's 360 Degrees Digital Influence Blog.
Like what Rohit had to say? Check out his book, Personality Not Included.
