Over the weekend, Buffer — an social media management/scheduling app — was hacked. This leads to lots of security questions, but that’s a discussion for another day … and probably another blog. As many PR people found themselves scrambling over the weekend to delete spam from their personal pages and their clients’ accounts, we were reminded that social media isn’t a M-F//9-5 gig. But, there’s an even bigger lesson here for all of us.
In the face of a fast-developing situation, Buffer’s immediate response was a textbook example of how to respond in a crisis. SearchEngineWatch asked co-founder and CMO Leo Widrich whether the “size of his company was an advantage; after all, larger brands may have stumbling blocks to near-instant cross-platform messaging by way of PR approval and legal teams.” His response:
“I believe that we simply defaulted to the Buffer values here, with one of our core values being ‘default to transparency,'” he said, adding, “We have very little structure yet at Buffer, so we could be very agile and act quickly without running into an ‘analysis paralysis’ problem.”
Buffer’s been widely praised for their quick response. Their process can be emulated by your company, the next time you find yourself in crisis mode. What did they do so right? Let’s break it down …
- Immediate communication from leadership. The email from founder Joel Gascoigne hit on all the key elements:
- A sincere apology
- Steps they’re taking to fix the situation
- What you, as a customer, should do next
- How to get more updates/continuing information
- Invitation to contact them
- Responsiveness on the right channels. In a crisis, you need to communicate via your customers’ preferred channels. For Buffer, that meant Facebook, Twitter and email. On Facebook and Twitter, Buffer had a team of people monitoring and responding throughout the day. Their responses were being offered in real-time, which tells me that they didn’t have to run comments through an arduous approval process. In a crisis, if you’re not quick, you’re not relevant. Empowering your social team to respond in real-time is critical.
- Frequent updates. With frequent social updates, Buffer kept users apprised of the situation and reassuring users that they were working on a solution. For example, they let users know that they were working directly with Facebook to track down the source of the hacking attack and they provided instructions to help people reset their passwords.They also used their blog to provide the latest news, updating the original post eight times.
- “Close the loop” communication. Once Buffer was back to normal, the Joel sent another email to notify customers and to reassure them that Buffer would continue to add additional security measures. From that email: “What is left for us right now is to complete our technical analysis and take further security measures. We will follow up with another update on this soon.”
While we all hope our companies/clients avoid crisis situations, it’s inevitable that something will go wrong at some point. By planning ahead and incorporating social media into your crisis plan, you can mitigate the damage. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all crisis plan; however, we can certainly identify best practices from Buffer and tweak those steps to fit our own unique situation.
Brands are frequently chastised on social media for poor communication during a crisis. Instead of harping on the negative, let’s share other best-practice examples, like Buffer. In the comments, feel free to add examples of brands that handled a crisis situation well.