4 indispensable tips for surviving a crisis

How can you manage and survive a crisis? Start with these four basic yet indispensable tips:

1. Define your tipping point. Understand what an emerging crisis looks like for your brand. In these times, if you are in business and have access to the internet, chances are good that you’ve had at least one negative tweet or bad review. Though the first one may seem like an emerging crisis, it probably isn’t.

Review your data to determine your “normal” (daily or weekly average) level of criticism, undesirable posts and negative sentiment. If you’ve already been through a crisis or two, take note of how quickly early situations escalated. If you’re a crisis virgin, then look at a competitor or a peer organization.

If you have a social listening or media monitoring system set up, it should automatically alert you when you exceed those “normal” levels. If you’re doing your monitoring manually, keep track of the number and frequency of negative stories or comments. When they exceed your baseline, it might be time to dust off your crisis plan.

2. Have a crisis plan. Rehearse and update it every six months. If you just thought to yourself “What crisis communications plan?” then drop everything and write one.