A crisis can strike any brand at any time. Whether it involves a complaint about customer service, a product malfunction or recall, or an insensitive social media post or marketing campaign, no brand is immune from experiencing an event that can harm its reputation. Now, as these events have the potential to go viral through social media exposure, it is imperative that brands utilize social monitoring tools for proactive crisis management.
Social Monitoring Versus Social Listening
First, when it comes to crisis management, it is important to distinguish social monitoring from social listening. Both practices involve understanding the conversation surrounding a brand, particularly in online reviews, comments, and on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. However, while social listening takes a big picture approach to analyzing this data with the goal of spotting trends and market gaps to target, social monitoring involves being on the lookout for specific content, which is particularly useful for crisis management.
Social monitoring can track online content that mentions both a brand and a particular event that could be problematic. Or it could track mentions of your brand that refer to a particular store or reference other negative reviews. This kind of targeted monitoring is key because crisis management must take a proactive approach to identifying posts that have the potential to go viral and identifying when posts are coalescing around a problematic issue.
Sentiment Analysis To Identify Negative Content
If it weren’t for this nuance, companies would be left in the lurch: Social monitoring is only effective in identifying potentially problematic online content if it is able to detect how your brand is being discussed. Enter sentiment analysis, which uses powerful AI to detect the underlying opinions and emotions in online content.
For example, NetBase Quid AI offers sentiment analysis that enables users to understand both the degree and magnitude of negative sentiment expressed in a post. It is important to differentiate the two. The content with the highest potential to cause a viral crisis will express a high degree, which refers to the general negative valence of the emotion, but will also express high magnitude, which refers to the intensity of expression.
Monitoring the direction and strength of sentiment tied to a particular event enables you to pinpoint issues with especially high viral potential and prioritize issues by severity as you engage in crisis management. When potential issues are identified based on negative sentiment, you can use NetBase Quid AI to break down the problematic conversations at issue, informing messaging for an appropriate and swift response.
Pinpoint Relevant Data for Proactive and Efficient Crisis Management
At the heart of an effective crisis management approach to social media is the ability to filter out irrelevant data for streamlined contextual analysis of what’s being said, by whom, and where.
Using social monitoring tools, you can tune out the noise and identify what issues are causing your consumers problems, which consumers are discussing the issue, and which platforms are hosting the discussion. You can quickly identify channels with the highest volume of negative feedback. This understanding of the source of the crisis enables you to join in on the conversation in the most impactful environment and speak directly to the issues and individuals that matter most to the issue’s resolution.
Measure The Effectiveness of Intervention
Finally, as you intervene to mitigate or prevent crises, it is crucial that you analyze the effectiveness of your interventions. Which channels and messages had the most impact on moving consumer sentiment away from negative sentiment? This information is invaluable as you construct your future approach to crisis management.
Using NetBase Quid social monitoring tools, you can analyze brand sentiment before, during, and after a crisis, as well as before, during, and after a particular intervention. NetBase Quid AI can analyze this data quickly, so you can track how consumers are responding mid crisis and adjust strategy accordingly.
And when the crisis is over, you can compare consumer sentiment data to your historical benchmarks to ensure that your brand emerges healthy with its reputation intact.