Getting A Handle On Crisis Management

You may already have a few general Twitter handles in use, but your PR department needs to have a handle devoted solely to the purpose of addressing crisis situations. Not only does this serve you in terms of keeping marketing tweets separate of crisis management tweets, but it gives your audience an easier means of zeroing in on the information they need.

Meeting The Challenge

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges of managing a crisis via Twitter is the character limits of posting a tweet. Whereas other social media platforms may allow for a more elaborate message, Twitter forces you to be concise. With only 140 characters to work with, you have to be conscious of your word choice and the impact it will have on your followers.

Making A Real Connection

Another social media platform that can be combined with your Twitter strategy is YouTube. When a PR issue arises, simply create a video addressing it, upload it to YouTube, and then spread the word via Twitter. Not only does this put a real face on your brand, but it allows you to connect to your audience in a sincere, emotional manner, which isn’t always possible through text communications.

Sponsoring Tweets

Another tool that Twitter puts at your fingertips comes in the form of sponsored tweets. In a crisis situation, paying to keep your tweets at the top of the searches only makes sense. Plus, you can actually adjust your advertising campaign so that it targets your specific audience. Targeted crisis management has never been easier.

Staying Ahead Of The Conversation

The advantage of a social media platform like Twitter is that it gives you immediate access to the public and allows you to engage in real-time conversation, two key factors in influencing brand-related conversation and preventing small issues from snowballing into crisis situations.

To stay ahead of the conversation, you need dedicated representatives monitoring online conversations about your brand. Not only does monitoring customer feedback online allow you to address complaints in a timely fashion, but it gives you a broader perspective regarding the needs of your customers, and it gives you the opportunity to react accordingly.

As previously published on Social Strategy1

• Paul Greenberg, owner, The 56 Group
• Esteban Kolsky, founder and principal, ThinkJar
• Brent Leary, owner, CRM Essentials
• Denis Pombriant, CEO, Beagle Research Group
• Brian Solis, principal, Altimeter Group
• Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO, Constellation Research

Carlson made these predictions:

1. Context services will sharpen the picture of customers and habits.
   Context services will be able to more accurately describe customers’ characteristics, location, buying habits, interests, social relationships and other factors — based on examination of their social media participation and from location-based services, smartphone applications and mobile-phone usage patterns.
2. Real-time customer intelligence will become available.
   Powerful new analytics programs will allow almost instantaneous gathering, analysis and use of customer data and intelligence These applications will make use of cloud computing and other technologies that can tap an almost limitless source of computer resources to provide the infrastructure for real-time services.
3. Television will assume a major role in customer engagement.
   Television, found in more than 115 million American households, will assume a new found importance in CRM activities. Companies are likely to interact with customers through Internet-connected TVs that take full advantage of the in-home big-screen experience.
4. Virtual meetings will become more common and will alter business.
   Customers will be able to participate in fully interactive virtual meetings with company representatives or even other customers. This ability can enable the creation of participatory virtual conferences, trade shows, product demonstrations, or other forms of sales and marketing activities.
5. Gamification will become a major component of business strategy.
   Gamification — the process of adding game elements to nongame activities to increase engagement — will allow companies to add educational activities, offer interactive contest and sweepstakes participation, and provide social rewards programs. Companies will be able to identify customer behavior and interest through their participation in these gaming activities.

Televisions will definitely become more interactive, and as such marketers will be able to target audiences and MEASURE, and we’re able to do on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.  In the next five years, though mobile gamification is where it is going, in my opinion.  Thoughts?

First let’s look at that string of words – the search terms.  According to the latest keyword statistics, English users predominantly use 2 and 3 word search terms, with single keyword searches becoming less common.  Personally, I use more because I was the most relevant results, which is the biggest challenge for Google and other search engines – return the most relevant results and spare people from combing through the less relevant results.  So, the more detailed a user’s search, the more relevant the results. Tip – I also like to use quotes a lot in searches, where I am looking for an exact phrase, like “mobile marketing statistics 2013″ which returns specific reports containing that exact string of words.

According to Google, their algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals, some of which you’d expect, like how often the search terms occur on the webpage, if they appear in the title or whether synonyms of the search terms occur on the page. Google accounts for almost 70% of all searches conducted in the United States, so they’re doing a lot right when it comes to their page results.  Which leads me to PageRank…somewhat of a misnomer.

One of their many known innovations is PageRank, named for Larry Page (Google’s co-founder and CEO). PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

Inbound links are the unsung hero of successful inbound marketing. They help increase traffic, improve SEO, and — if included in an article by a major news source — can be a great public relations win.  Hubspot did a good job of explaining why the creation of inbound links are key to improving search ranking, and how these links should be created to have the most impact:

But what is an inbound link? In plain English, an inbound link is a link from one website to another website. For example, this is an inbound link to CNN.com. The inbound description is generally used by the person receiving the link. So CNN might say, “I received an inbound link from HubSpot.” (And you’re welcome, CNN. We’d love an inbound link or two from you!)

So why do you need inbound links? Two reasons. First, it’s an opportunity to receive referral traffic from another website. An inbound link from a blog is an avenue for that blog’s readers to visit you. But depending on the amount of traffic that blog or website receives, the link may send a low volume of traffic.

But there’s something even better with more long-term benefits that inbound links are good for — SEO! So how does that work?

Read more at blog.hubspot.com

It seems only fitting that with data points like followers, retweets, pins, comments, shares, plus ones, watchers, likes, and unlikes we need to have some new way of measuring the intersection and union of all of these data points and more importantly, their relevance.  Sam Decker of My Venture Pad and formerly CMO of BazaarVoice shared, “with the birth of apps like Flipboard and Instapaper, those pageviews aren’t really page views as much as they are a reformatting of the page’s content.”

Think about it – a website could have low pageviews and have tons of likes or shares on Facebook or LinkedIn. While it’s not typically the case, it is possible and so doesn’t that increase the influence or reach of that article or site?   What is the overall network effect or virality?  Have you heard of RRI?  It stands for ”Rapid and Residual Impact”.

From a twitter perspective, RRI is a pretty straight forward metric.  It’s a webpage’s total number of views + the number of tweets for that page’s URL. This is merely pageviews++ but underscores the importance of where the page is surfacing around the Internet, particularly via Twitter and more importantly, tweets, like pageviews, can be measured against a timestamp.

One item to note here is that the sharing of a link can occur completely outside of the web context, meaning, URLs can be tweeted and retweeted from within a native application from a smartphone, tablet or even a traditional PC-based desktop app. That’s why, from my perspective, the pageview isn’t the only bit of importance for a webpage’s URL – its ability to create an impression in a user’s twitter feed has value as well.

Scalable network metrics

The concept of something like RRI can be mixed and mashed with any number of social media or even website data points. Imagine combining Instagram likes with Pinterest pins of a particular photo. Brands could be and should be leveraging this channel, but they have no way of measuring its efficacy. Note, that until just recently, Instagram was a mobile only service. The data coming form the sensors of mobile devices (e.g. GPS location) coupled with more direct data points (e.g. Instagram likes) only exacerbates the need for the ability to start more comprehensively measuring all of these consumable data points.

Imagine an administrative control panel where you can select and finely tune the data points and social media sharing capabilities to come up with your own custom metrics. You decide that Facebook likes, LinkedIn shares, Retweets and unique pageviews within a geo-fenced region of Southern California are your core metric for measuring network reach for a piece of content your company is surfacing on the web, or shall I more appropriately call it the network. This is doable. There is nothing technologically barring someone or some company from building this. This scales horizontally as more data sources and social networks surface. Have a look at If This Then That and how they continue to add more service providers for one’s custom web hook “recipes”. The same thing would apply for adding Github followers, Etsy likes or any other consumable data point from a site or service.

Whoever gets there first will have a data-backed goldmine that nearly every brand, retailer and service provider in the world will pay for.

And while there’s no such firestorm in the social media world, there is evidence that men and women use social networks differently.  The Christian Science Monitor‘s Chelsea Sheasley shared interesting social media statistics from Pew Research Center that suggest social media may be a woman’s world:

• 58% of Facebook users are female.
• Women are twice as likely to make multiple comments a day.
• Social media use doubled between 2008 and 2010, but male usage dropped 3%.

What’s more, online bulletin Pinterest is proving to be a clear example of a social media gender usage gap: 68% of Pinterest users are women, according to this Modea infographic.

The Pew study’s lead author and Rutgers University communications professor Keith Hampton provided some insight into the gap on social sites: “Women historically are the networkers in relationships […] Larger social forces that have nothing to do with the site’s interface explain better why men are less engaged on social media.”

Sheasley reports that start-ups are trying to find opportunity in the gender disparity by creating social networks designed just for the guys.  For example, Gentlemint is an invitation-only site that was described by Forbes as “Pinterest for manly things.” In contrast to Pinterest’s DIY crafts and yummy recipes, a Gentlemint post might feature anything from a golf infographic to a slingshot. It is reportedly losing money, but co-founder Brian McKinney says the company is working on a plan to monetize the site.

What’s been your experience with gender disparity and social media? Have you noticed a significant (or not so significant) difference? Has it affected your social media strategy?