There’s nothing worse than being unprepared for a crisis. And in business, it’s not an if, but when scenario. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for brands to take their eye off their market intelligence when things are going well; which leaves them to mop up around consumer and competitive intelligence baselines that shifted while they weren’t paying attention.
Diligent monitoring is your best friend when things go south. But whether your market research is up to date or not, we’ll discuss how market intelligence based on social media listening can get you out of a jam. In particular we’ll look at how Quid Social offers crisis management must-haves for brands with a focus on:
- Understanding category and consumer sentiment
- Knowing how and where a crisis starts
- Creating messaging to get ahead of and shape the narrative
And here are some stats and facts we uncovered about crisis management that underscore its importance:
- A crisis is usually comprised of three elements: an organizational threat, the element of surprise and a short decision-making window.
- The 2019 PwC Global Crisis Survey found that 69% of respondents had experienced a crisis within the preceding five years, while 95% expected to be hit by one in the future.
- Fast, focused and effective crisis response is critical as only 30% of board members involved in a brand crisis said their reputations had recovered in less than a year.
So, from a brand perspective, let’s see how Quid Social can give your brand data-driven insights to respond quickly and safeguard your reputation.
Understanding Category & Consumer Sentiment
A keen grasp of your social media baseline metrics is foundational for crisis preparedness; and that includes understanding that they may shift over time. Having alerts set up for when your mentions go outside of your parameters helps you to get on the ball fast.
Brand awareness both in-house, and within your category regarding consumer sentiment tells you where your normal is. And when a crisis hits, it’s equally important to isolate the conversations around it and measure consumer sentiment – in essence creating a new crisis baseline to measure as you mitigate it.
Quid Social makes isolating and measuring these conversations easy. For example, the crisis brought on by the pandemic has been hard enough on retailers like Family Dollar. Back in May, an unfortunate shooting of a security guard enforcing a state-mandated mask policy in a Michigan store added fuel to the mask vs. no mask debate.
That conversation resulted in new brand mentions around the topic for Family Dollar in July amidst civil unrest conversations elsewhere. Isolating conversations outside of your normal wheelhouse and understanding where your consumer sentiment stands helps your brand target the fluctuations caused by crises.
Isolated as a group, here is a look at consumer sentiment around the Michigan incident and the subsequent issue and repeal of a store-wide mask policy.
Fortunately for Family Dollar, these conversations are subsiding. But a timeline view shows just how fast these peripheral conversations can develop.
Knowing How & Where a Crisis Starts
Social media listening affords brands a look into many social aspects that should be monitored over time. They’re great for building targeted marketing campaigns and finding answers when a crisis hits.
And one of the best things brands can do is understand where the bulk of their online mentions are taking place. Below is an analysis we ran on Adidas over the last three months showing their top fifteen websites by sentiment. Breaking it down by percentage would give Adidas a good understanding going forward of how they measure up over each website.
And analyzing the same sites by topic cluster as a percentage shows what topics are making up the conversation on each. So, if we were to see negative sentiment growing on a particular site, we could see what they’re talking about.
For instance, were there to be an issue with a new Adidas App update, or a non-functioning promo code causing a fuss, we could isolate those conversations and address them where they’re happening.
So, if there was a crisis arising with the app update and Adidas wanted to address Twitter users specifically, they could do that by isolating the Adidas App cluster.
And then they could filter this cluster for Twitter mentions as we did below to begin a targeted crisis response to settle users’ minds. After all, consumers love to see that brands care about their concerns.
Creating Messaging to Get Ahead Of & Shape the Narrative
And speaking of getting the message out to consumers, not every crisis is of the in-your-face variety. It could be argued that missed opportunities to address customers on an unforeseen, or under-served front are a sort of crisis in themselves. And too, sometimes you may not be able to address the consumer directly as we did above.
For example, we ran an analysis on Humm Kombucha and found one such opportunity in a simple Reddit post.
Here a user is asking if Humm Kombucha is safe for use while on a keto diet; on the r/keto subreddit that boasts over 2 million users. Most subreddits have rules against brands marketing within them, so answering them directly is likely out of the question.
But it does offer Humm Kombucha the opportunity to create messaging to steer this narrative through other means and capture a whole demographic instead. Focused ad messaging on Instagram talking about keto directly, or an initiative with influencers in the keto-diet space could get the answers to users and build interest.
After all, lots of people are asking about kombucha and keto online, so targeted marketing could help amplify their message into the keto community.
These are just a few examples of how the next generation artificial intelligence (AI) powering Quid Social helps brands level-up their market intelligence through social media listening. Crises and missed opportunities are always around the corner, but there’s no reason that your brand doesn’t have to be ready for them.
Is your brand on top of your baselines, ready to act when negative sentiment begins to redline? Don’t be among the 70% whose reputations are still healing over a year after a crisis – reach out for a demo and put your brand ahead of the curve!
