crisis management in the digital age
“IT takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” — Warren Buffet. Oftentimes, crisis management is required when something goes terribly wrong. It could be when it’s discovered that a company’s product or service was defective. It could be when a bad customer service incident is caught on video. It could be when a scandal involving the company’s founder is unveiled. But sometimes a crisis can appear right out of the blue with no precipitating incident. Just ask Nestle.
In late January, entrepreneur Vishen Lakhiani of MindValley, an e-learning company, published on his Facebook account a video that was critical of Milo’s sugar content, which he claimed was 40 per cent. It became a viral phenomenon with over 800,000 views.
The scary thing for any major corporation is that this kind of public relations nightmare can happen to them too. Here’s what you can do to better prepare your company against such an eventuality. Vulcan Post was smart in their action. something critical of say, Maxis or DiGi, on social media and you’ll probably get a response from its social media team within the same day, trying to help you resolve the problem. This is good but not many companies are doing it, which is a shame because it’s not very hard to do. There are plenty of social media monitoring software that allows you to keep track of instances when your company’s brand name is mentioned on social media. Oftentimes, consumers will post complaints directly on a company’s social media pages but sometimes they do it on their own pages (Lakhiani, for example, made his posting on his own Facebook account not Milo Malaysia’s Page). It pays to invest in monitoring tools to stay abreast of all mentions regarding your brand. Don’t wait until it’s all over the news before you realise that you’ve got a crisis on your hands.
The whole purpose of monitoring online chatter is so you can be alerted of situations that need to be addressed immediately. Lakhiani’s video was posted on Jan 25. The first traditional media response from Nestle came out on Jan 30. On Feb 2, Lakhiani posted a follow up video and on Feb 6 and 7, Nestle’s rebuttals started appearing in traditional Lakhiani’s post on Facebook.
media. Each time there was a lag of about five days for Nestle’s traditional media response to appear. The company’s social media response was quicker, with about a two-day lag. There was a response which appeared on Milo Malaysia’s Facebook Page on Jan 27 (and updated Feb 4). This is still too slow in the age of social media. For an explosive video like this, the initial response should have been on the same day itself. Remember, in the time that it takes for you to respond, netizens will fill in the vacuum with comments of their own and they will also share the video with their friends and family. Never let the story get ahead of you. Instead, you should be steering the narrative. At the time of writing, Lakhiani’s video has over 9,500 Likes and 18,000 Shares. Meanwhile, Milo Malaysia’s response post has 299 Likes and 106 shares. Why the huge disparity?
Lakhiani’s post was a video featuring him speaking directly to the camera and proclaiming things like: “I wouldn’t feed Milo to my child as a recreational drink.” Milo Malaysia’s response was a text posting (no pictures, no video, just plain old text) containing facts and figures. Is it any wonder that people would Like and Share the former much more than the latter? If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million. Why respond to video with text? Why not instead have your spokesperson, or better still your CEO, address the issue by speaking directly to the camera and presenting your company’s point of view? And for good measure, have him declare: “My family drinks Milo every day”.