Social media is ready for crisis management

I have read chapter7-10 in these two weeks. I think I learnt a lot from the case of Dell’s reputation management. It makes me feel that it’s important to engage with the community.

The dell’s case shows us that people use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion about a brand or organization, to tell you where things are good and to tell you where things are bad. And to complain. The brand should reply when a factual inaccuracy is being discussed, or when a customer has had a bad experience and is reporting it online. And this case remains me of another real case study I have read before. It happened in Portugal. Ensitel, a well known mobile phone store, tried to shut up a blogger using lawyers. The blogger is an Ensitel's client who bought a broken cell phone which the store refused to refund and, therefore, wrote some posts about it. This blogger was addressed this week by an order from the court to delete these posts and all social media community reacted very negatively to Ensitel action. Ensitel then began to delete all negative comments on its facebook page and, of course, everything got worse. Not happy with this, Ensitel then sent a press release reinforcing the attack to the blogger. We can image what will happen, yes, Ensitel was on all Portuguese newspapers on the next day and a lot of opinion makers were commenting on that. There's also a Facebook Group with thousands of followers named “I Will Never Buy Anything on Ensitel”. This case tells us that you have to monitor what people are saying because they are always talking about your brand.

Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff emphasize that It's all about engagement in groundswell and I think that means companies need to have the tools to listen and engage with social media and react swiftly and appropriately.

When crisis comes, if you already have a clear process for dealing with complaints and discussions about your brand online，that will be the best. You need a blog or online community that on behalf of your brand in social media let people to be up-to-date on what is happening and able to speak openly and truthfully for the brand. Otherwise, you will find it much more difficult to go in when things go wrong and take part in discussions. All in all, what you need to do is to engage first.

Social media is ready for crisis management, what about you?