Managing Social Media Crisis, What you need to know?

Digital Marketing Manager, Fouad Khafaga Talks About Crisis Management

Why and how should a business prepare for Crisis Management?


The answer to why is because it will happen. Every business in the world either faced or will face some kind of crisis; that tests everything the brand stands for.


Some brands have an active inertia effect – they work in their business not on their business. Meaning they get engaged and overwhelmed by the day to day activities, that they there is a little thought goes into such strategic problems like crisis management.


The answer to how – is like a story about a King that had to punish his son by throwing a big rock at him. The issue here is that because he is the king he had to follow the law, and because he is a father he didn’t want to hurt his son. He struggled until a tribe leader from his people told him to break that rock into very small stones which then will have minimal effect on the son.


In other words, breaking a crisis down into minimal manageable problems, and having the respective teams deal with those problems to dissolve the crisis is far more likely to prevent the crisis.
Looking at social media, for example with a brand hiding, deleting, ignoring and not responding in a timely manner to their community.


If a brand is that fragile to negative exposure, then that brand is more likely not to survive an avalanche of negative reviews (crisis) when an event goes not as planned.


What’s the worst that could happen?
Brand losses brand equity and ultimately credibility.
A real-life example of a crisis that was managed well would be at an event we recently attended.
We had a total shut down of the internet – the hotel we were in just had Wi-Fi problems, so we were totally cut off not just from producing and publishing content but from updates, behind the scenes work, major events moments, etc.

We were not even able to respond and interact with the audience already present at the event.
The solution was actually dividing the crisis into urgent situations that needed to be solved

• We had a situation room set up (before the event) in a different place with monitoring screen just for social listening, monitoring and interacting with existing audience
• Before the event we had already scheduled content ( quotes, opening remarks, awards announcements ). That content was published by publishing tools
• We had 3 members of the team capture key moments and event milestone live on different platforms through data plan
• Finally we created an event summary videos to make sure that the offline experience was captured online

Steps to Take

As we discussed, there are different types of crises – and planning and forethought can potentially prevent many of them from ever developing; and even if a crisis does then arise, with clear procedure or a chain of command available, the impact can be lessened.


By taking a proactive approach to your business, and putting safeguards and strategies in place, you put your company in a stronger position to deal with any issues that arise.
Actions to take before a Crisis occurs:

1. Develop Clear Social Media Strategies – such as Social Media Management
2. Use Data Analytics to Monitor your Brand – utilized Social Listening to understand your audience
3. Train Your Staff to recognize changes in attitude and trends online and in the venue
4. Brainstorm various situations and make plans for the ones that seem more likely to occur
5. Establish a clear chain of command and assign roles so your staff know who to speak with

Actions to take during a Crisis

1. Gauge the public mood and prepare an appropriate response
2. Be honest and transparent – let your customers hear from you and not a third party
3. Give relevant updates regularly
4. Respond to questions and comments where possible
5. If not possible, post a list of frequently asked questions and direct your audience to those
6. If it has affected people directly – apologies, be humble.

Actions to take after a Crisis

1. Continue monitoring the data analytics to be sure that the situation is resolved
2. Thank people for their patience and encourage their continued support
3. Avoid phrases such as ‘lessons learned’ – give concrete evidence of any changes being made
4. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen – learn from it and grow
   
   
   This post was originally posted here http://bit.ly/2wO7mz7
   Would love to talk more on twitter @Fouad_Khafaga

Brand Biology - Evolution by Customer Selection

90% of startups fail, 80% of product launches are not successful and 60% of the fortune 500 companies in the 1970’s do not exist today.

Your species (brands) are dying in an alarming rates.

In face of such grim truth brands and brand managers should seek survival tools. In this article I will cover two survival tactics and strategies of those who were able to survive the wild of the markets, those who were heard among the white noise and stand out from the crowd.

“If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.”

― Mario Andretti

1- Survival of the fastest:

One of the reasons of extinction for brands is refusing to adapt or not adapting fast enough to new technology, even tho their markets and their customers has adapted to it.

The simple and most obvious example of that is websites adapting to mobile technology even tho:

• Google is now penalising websites that are non-mobile friendly.  

• Two-thirds of smartphone users say a mobile-friendly site makes them more likely to buy a company's product or service.
• 61% says that if they don't find what they're looking for (probably within about five seconds), they'll click away to another site.

We are still faced with the fact that 91% of small business’ websites are not optimized for mobile use.

Adapting fast to technological shifts is a key tool to a brand’s survival.

Borders didn't think they need to adapt to amazon fast. Blockbuster video didn't think that Netflix was a threat and that digital was a threat that needs to be  eliminated fast.

Borders closed all of its retail locations and sold off its customer loyalty list, comprising millions of names, to competitor Barnes & Noble for $13.9 million. Borders' locations have been purchased and re-purposed by other large retailers.

Saddled itself with over $1 billion in debt and was unable to make the transition to digital. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and has been replaced by Netflix and other digital services.

Fast adaption is a survival tool as customers don't select slow brands, they let them slowly perish in a non digital world for maybe a nostalgic to revive  them in a casual conversation.

“It’s easy to predict the future, just remove the fragile elements from the present”

Nssim Taleb

2- Survival of the Antifragile:

“Fragile” if you read this word written on a box that is delivered to you, normally other words that associate with this box are handle with care,easily broken or caution.

The Oxford dictionary defines fragile as ”easily broken or damaged”.

In his book “Antifragile” Nassim Taleb asks, what is the opposite of the word fragile?

What would be written on that box if the item inside is the opposite of fragile.

Words like strong, robust and solid doesn't really mean anti-fragile. Because a fragile object is very risk sensitive where those words describe more of a risk neutral case, where the pressure or risk doesn't really harm the items yet it definitely doesn't benefit it.

If there is an antifragile item in that box the words on that box could read as please mishandle, add pressure or the item inside gains from risk. In this case the objects actually benefit from risk and pressure.

Some brands were able to find a lifeline, a cure from fragileness and a process to becoming an antifragile brand. Introduce risk in fractions so your brand can survive, this process is called 70 - 20 - 10.

Where 70% of the Brands investment is in “Now”, or established and successful programs; 20% goes to “new,” or emerging trends that are starting to gain traction; and 10% goes to “next”.

This concept can be applied to any brand’s activities where 70% of the activities are safe, familiar and cash cows, 20% of the activities are for the stars, trendy and new and finally 10% is for the risky more dangerous activities. This process seeks sustainable growth and most importantly antifragility.

 

Customers tend to abandoned fragile brands and leave them to the memory of textbooks and academic studies of worst case scenarios.

These are two branding survival tools in this series of articles. We will be unlocking more branding ecology mysteries and other survival mechanism in the coming articles.

Who Cares about twitter anyways? (5 different ways to use twitter)

The first and most valid question you could have reading the headline of this articles is.

Who cares?

I mean, that in the most literal sense of the word, who cares about twitter? Who is using it and are your target audience using the platform?

Since that this is both vital and valid question we will first go through some data and numbers of who is using twitter and how is twitter being used?

Then we will go through the list of 5 different ways to use twitter (other than a micro blogging platform) to benefit your Dubai based business both in the MENA region and globally.

Let’s look at the numbers shall we..

In the most recent report http://bit.ly/2coDD4d the state of social media marketing 2016, Marketing profs published the following states about twitter:

  A-     Twitter came in the second place right behind Facebook as the social platform that marketers use in both B2B and B2C focused markets.

  B-      Twitter came third as the paid social media platform right after Facebook and Google ads (technically we can considered it second since Google ads is not a social media platform ) .

  C-      In terms of number of worldwide social network users Twitter came with a sizable number of audience of 320 million users.

(That was right behind Instagram aka Facebook’s gallery sidekick, which came with 400 million users).

Now you might be thinking this is only on a global level which is great for branding reasons like building an online reputation or brand online existence or even gaining global online traction and traffic yet how will that benefit a Dubai based business targeting the MENA region ?

Well let’s look at regional numbers shall we?

According to the Arab social media report published last year http://bit.ly/1Ux2M93  there are some interesting facts about twitter:

  A-     39% of the Arab users access twitter on a daily basis.

  B-      In terms of subscription KSA and UAE were the highest countries from the Arab region with (53% and 51% respectively) .

  C-      In terms of accessing Twitter through an app, the highest were UAE and Bahrain (45% and 40%, respectively).

There is a very important point that needs to be addressed here before we go further, these numbers and stats are not to stay drop everything and implement a radical paradigm shift to both your business and to your marketing plans toward twitter based campaigns, yet these facts show that twitter as a platform has both regional and global influence that needs to be addressed and added to your marketing tool kit.

And here are 5 different ways you can harvest the power of social media through twitter for your business.

  1-      Customer service tool.( monitor your own handle or handles)

        If you are wondering should I have an online presence or not?, or if you are       wondering should I interact with negative comments or not?

Your customers are not.

They are both online and active,

According to the Microsoft’s 2016 Global State of Customer Service Report 55% of consumers’ customer service interactions now begin online rather than on the phone or in person. This percentage jumps to 65% for consumers ages 18 – 34.

 That is why brands responsiveness on twitter has increased from 14hrs to 9hrs in 2014.

Some of the tactics that you can use to enhance the customer service side of your brand.

A-     Monitor your brand twitter handle and set up an alarm for quicker respond.

B-      Monitor your brands services and products as your customers might not be aware of your twitter handle , yet they might have experienced your products and services.

C-      If you have the funding  for it set up a situation room for your twitter accounts (https://www.quora.com/Which-companies-have-physical-social-media-listening-centers)

  2-      Competition monitoring.( adding competitors)

Some of the tactics that you can implement to monitor both your market and your competition are:

    B- Monitor Key words that relates to your industry in general.

    c- Monitor trends and new buzz campaigns even especially if it’s not yours.

  3-      Establish thought leadership in your field.

Facebook has mark zugerburg, Apple Had Steve jobs, Microsoft has Satya Nadella who do you have?

In other words who is the face behind your band and how is that face interacting with the public. Twitter can help humazing your brand and engage in creating your brand identify here is how:

A-     Set up an account for your brand ambassadors and your brands leadership team.

B-      Engage in twitter chats and twitter conversations.

C-      Link back to your Brands account from the bio of your ambassadors and your thought leaders account.

  4-      Social listening and Market analysis tool.

Twitter lists is an option that your brand can benefit from , lists gives your brand the option of social listening option to a specific need or your market potential needs and letting your target audience know that you are listening , monitoring and interacting. Here are a couple of lists that you can create:

A-     List of a market need either actual or potential.

B-      List of key words that relates to your market.

C-      List of other partner markets for example of you are in hospitality you might need to listen to (referrals programs- customer service complaints – tourism and destinations).

  5-      Creating a social buzz around a specific campaign.

The final and one of the strongest strengths of twitter is events, twitter feeds on that being a mico blogging website and the average lifetime of a tweet is about 18 minutes if you have an event for your brand you need to feed your tweet to the platform with the highest volume of tweets as you can here are some effective tactics that you can use to maximize your reach during an Event:

A-     Live video coverage during the event especially that now twitter allows longer videos .

B-      Create a hashtage dedicated to the event and drive traffic to it.

C-      Encourage conversations by having a showcase screens in the event with the live coverage of the conversations.

D-     Transfer the offline atmosphere and environment of your event online through creating a story telling narrative of the event duration.

Feel free to extend this conversation on twitter of course 

My handle is :@Fouad_khafaga 

Brand Biology (Define your species).

Brand Biology

“Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier

Brand biology is a metaphorical term that I will be using during this series of articles, to refer to different types of elements, factors, cognitive phenomena, and components, that gives a brand life and help the brand survive in the different environment of the market.

Your brand biology is your customer’s categorization, your brand’s DNA is your audience perception, and your clients market is your future environment.  The target market defines your species and their thoughts shape your organisms.

There is more than one element to the idea of brand biology and customer categorization, in this article I will review two elements, the first is related to customer perception and the second is cognitive behavior.

Customer’s perception is manipulated and persuaded by factors like brand color, name, personal experience and campaigns.

In a paper that was published by California State Polytechnic University, titled the Effect of theForeign Brand on Consumer Perception.  The paper empirically examines the influence of brand names (foreign versus national) on consumer perception.

The results support the hypothesis that the national brand elicits more positive consumer perception than the foreign brands. In this study, consumer perception is operationalized by four constructs: attitude toward the brand, purchase intention, advertisement feeling, and attitude toward the advertisement.

This is important in terms of brand biology; just the awareness of your species as mentioned in this study affects your survival. In future articles we will look at your brand survival tactics, brand environment, brand biotic and abiotic.

The second element that affects the categorization of the brand is cognitive behavior, as humans we tend to create mental short cuts, especially in the age of the digital worlds the choices of any product or service could be overwhelming.

Within social psychology, cognitive miser is an umbrella theory of social cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attribution biases.

 The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world. The term cognitive miser was first introduced by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984.

 We tend to crate mental short cuts to ease the process of digesting, transforming and exploring data of any kind. The brain activity of categorizing data lies at the heart of cognitive economy. We treat things as being of a kind so we don’t waste neural processing cycles in details that are irrelevant to the core o the process itself.

When we go to the beach we don’t remember every grain of sand, when we look at the forest we don’t name every tree that we see.

And there is a very good evolutionary reason or this, it’s to prevent our brains from getting overwhelmed with data, making sure we don’t have too many brain tabs open at the same time or too many labeled products on the same shelf because too many choices are paralyzing in most cases.

The process of categorizing data in three main ways

the first one is the Gross or partial appearance which means if they look the same they are the same.
The second form of categorizing is functionality; appearance in this case is not the major concern if it can be used for writing it belongs to the writing tools section and sometimes we might call it a pen.
 Finally the third way of categorizing is conceptual and a perfect example of that is the tool box “If it fixes things it’s in the box”

In order for your brand biology to be compatible in such a harsh environment, in order or your kind to survive, the brand must master the skills necessary to stand out among your species.

First Study the industry before entering the market, understand the audience reactions to the existing, past and future products and services in your industry.  That will provide some needed input and insight into the customer’s perception.

Second define your species if your brand is serving an appearance, a function or a specific concept. Make sure you highlight those features build your campaigns based on how unique and authentic your brand is.

The elements of brand biology are many. Customer’s perception and audience cognitive behavior are two essential components of determining the DNA of your brand biology. 

4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company or start-up

4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company
or start-up

90% of start ups fail and 80% of product launches are not successful, and in this article you will know exactly how to join this number and fail your own start up as well.

In his book why do good companies go bad , Donald N Sull was able to determine what he called a dysfunctional mechanism or what we can call dynamic of failure.

The first approach to failure is strategic approach:

As human being we tend to have mental short cuts or cognitive schema in which we use to classify and categorize the world around us and business owners,

leaders and startup managers are no different than the rest of human beings, the way a start up or a business view the market and their own company is through mental schemes which are called strategic approach.

one of perfect examples to showcase such a concept is Firestone

“After seven decades of uninterrupted growth, Firestone reigned supreme in the U.S. tire industry in the 1970s.Then Michelin introduced the safer and more economical radial tire.

Firestone competed with Michelin head-to-head in Europe, but was blind to the threat to its core U.S. market, and so continued to produce conventional tires only. Firestone lost significant market share and was acquired a decade later.”

This is not just an example of business strategies this is an example of human thought as well, this methodology represents the fixed mind set process which deceives the human mind through ego-centrism that there is only one strategic approach to solve every problem and it’s  the only survival approach.

The second tip of startup destruction is the process:

At this stage you need to stick to the idea of transforming the process into rigid routines machine like and highly optimized a good example of this is McDonald’s.

“McDonald’s built its success on standardized processes, all dictated by headquarters. By rigidly following these procedures into the 1990s, McDonald’s lost market share to Burger King and Taco Bell, who were much quicker to meet customers’ changing desires for healthier foods.”

People in general are afraid of change let that be a change of situations, people, thought, change of hearts and for sure very afraid of change of process. Because when we as human know the sequence of things or the norm of specific process this gives us the illusion of control.

The fear of change is adaptive cognitive mechanism in itself; the fear of change is evolutionary in humans. Since times immemorial, man has liked routine. Our internal predispositions (heredity and genetics) teach us to resist change mainly to ‘always feel in control’. 

That’s one of the reasons people and businesses tend to stick to a specific process.

The main obvious downside to that these days is that we are living in a very dynamic environment and our ecology changes almost in a daily basis some of these changes are revolutionary to us as individuals and to our businesses.

I am almost certain that some of VHS, CD player store had a perfect process in terms of cleanness of the stores , customer care maybe loyalty programs yet this is all what it was. Just another process.

The third tip for the ultimate destruction is values:

I think this is self explanatory really how many times had dogmas or rigid beliefs destroyed companies, start-ups, life’s or a perfectly good cards game?

Bureaucracy  is a perfectly good example of a very important set of beliefs and values. The main idea is documentation of important events and rules that can regulate the work place to reach optimum efficiency,
yet what bureaucracy  has become is more of paper worship and it became a tool of destruction more than a tool to regulate and monitor.

By definition values are “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”

So the values o a company or an organization is regarded as useful when that specific institution has started after all they were put in place for a reason and these values contributed to the institution process of the institution,

however values can be solid and rigid as much as you can yet the trends , the tools or the whole ecology of an industry or a business changes in a consistent basis.

Companies that stick to rigid values are sticking to destructive code.

The fourth tip for you companies doom is relationships:

Now in general relationships can form some kind of shackles that will tie you in and hold growth. This could be relationships with constituencies—customers, suppliers, employees. When conditions change, however, these relationships can restrict flexibility.

The Example that was given in the book I am referring to here was apple

“Apple’s vision of technically elegant computers and its freewheeling culture attracted the world’s most creative engineers. Once computers became commodities, however, the company’s health depended on cutting costs and speeding up production time.

But Apple’s engineers refused to change, and the company’s relationship with its “star” employees damaged its ability to respond to market changes.”

This is not the only case or the only form of shackling in terms of relationships for example it might make sense now if you’re a marketing or digital agency to partner with an offline events company, they make the events and you make the online marketing buzz.

However on the long run when you have different demands from different clients alignment between let’s say telecom corporate (your clients) and wedding planners (their clients) might lead to an un healthy relation.

And there you have it these are the 4 amazingly granted tips or your own start up destruction

1-      Turn your strategic approach to a solid frames of thinking

2-      Turn process into rigid routines

3-      Turn your values into dogmas

4-      Turn relationships into shackles

Can you add more points to the list ?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment and we can always talk more on

Twitter : @fouad_khafaga

Google + : +FouadKhafaga