Managing a crisis before it hits is ideal – and this is an option with Quid Social. We’ll show you how to analyze a crisis and ways to uncover potential threats to brand reputation, so you can plan ahead and be ready.
More specifically, we’ll review:
- Proactive Brand Health
- Pinpointing Problems and Savvy Solutions
- Flushing Out the Competition During a Crisis
When you catch wind of a crisis early and understand its root cause, you can message out more effectively, that’s a given. We found:
- 79% of business decision makers are convinced they are only 12 months out from a crisis.
- According to a Stanford study, owning up to poor performance instilled the sense that a brand is likely to rebound as they’ve admitted their mistake and accepted responsibility.
- Timely communication to your investors and other parties is critical for keeping people happy.
How to Uncover Potential Threats to Brand Reputation
Mistakes and oversights happen, even with the best laid plans, and no brand is bulletproof. A crisis plan should be in place for every company, particularly as 79% of business decision makers are convinced they’re only 12 months out from a crisis. Planning for one and not having to use that plan is better than having a crisis and having no plan to mitigate your circumstances.
The first step is to investigate what’s critical for your company to know and create a search based on these questions. This is the basis of your story and provides framework to build from. It includes identifying critical insights that will point to detractors, competitors and even key demographic areas to focus on.
Consumer Intelligence prepares and quantifies all this intel into one digestible visual in Quid Social.
For example, illustrating conversation around Robinhood Financial Services, we see important topics emerging that represent the consumer narrative. Each cluster is made up of nodes, and each node is a single point data, or social media post. They are connected to one another based on semantic similarities.
Central to the image, are clusters which share common language and specific key themes relating to the search, with “Alternatives to Robinhood” forming the crux of the conversation. Toward the outer edges are smaller clusters that may signal emerging themes. Each is fully explorable to help you gain understanding of what is being said. A brand can optionally use keywords to filter out and locate topics moving within these collections.
Consumer intelligence can be sifted in many ways to capture details, including locating areas of discontent. This enables your enterprise to perform damage control more effectively and within a timely manner.
Once you know what the emerging themes are, it’s time to move on to identifying problem areas.
Pinpointing Issues to Address Immediately
According to a Stanford study, companies who’ve admitted to their oversights were often rewarded with higher future stock prices. And admitting fault instilled a sense that the brand had a deep understanding of what happened and would likely rebound. Likewise, transparency during a crisis can improve your brand health, if handled with kid gloves and armed with strong intel.
Crisis management requires a bit of dissection to pinpoint issues that need attention right away. Questions that should be asked to help organize this effort are:
- What vital conversations, or emerging market insights can be gathered from this crisis, and which have more impact and reach?
- What topics are seeing a boost, and which ones are waning?
- Who, what and where are people talking about these topics? And are there additional insights to consider as we drill down?
This is where benchmarking really pays off. Comparing conversation volume within each area and seeing how it trends over time can offer up crucial information about your company and how consumers view it.
Two main crises have been identified in our example: negative consumer sentiment around the relationship between Robinhood and the hedge fund, and consumers actively talking about investing alternatives.
This isn’t something to take lightly, it’s six times more expensive to win a new customer, than it is to keep your current ones. Acting swiftly is important if you hope to win in the court of public opinion. This is especially true if the information is false as fake news spreads six times faster than factual information. And the fastest emotion to spread online is rage, so you have an atom bomb waiting to go off. And likely a cadre of competitors waiting in the wings to capitalize on your crisis.
Identifying Competitors That May Capitalize on Your Crisis
Continuing with our example, who are the competitors being mentioned alongside Robinhood? We can see Fidelity, Coinbase and TD Ameritrade in the chart below, as well as other top company mentions in context, sorted by conversational cluster:
From this insight, we have a quick snapshot of where these conversations are happening, who is leading them (we see AOC driving conversation as well) and other topics and concerns to explore.
Social media monitoring tools give brands the opportunity to take a deep dive into a crisis. It’s the best way to capture a quick overview of an issue and map out a plan of attack for that super important response. We’ve seen so many brands respond in a way that makes a situation worse, and its entirely unnecessary. Understanding the undercurrents powering an issue – from every angle – is not difficult when you’re using the right tools. And it’s exceedingly necessary to do so.
It’s been a stressful year, which has made consumers feel vulnerable. And consumer stress in a crisis comes down to how in control they feel. If your brand has mistakenly made them feel unprotected or increased their stress levels, they could jump into the arms of a willing and ready competitor. Consumer intelligence can help you gain your footing and win consumers back. It can mean the difference between your next success story or ‘lesson learned’ for another blog post. Reach out for a demo and we’ll help you land on the right side of that narrative.