The ultimate guide to managing a social media crisis

This is probably the most important blog post you’ll never need. Drawn from a section of my book “The NOW Revolution,” I gave this presentation about social media crisis recovery recently as part of the Social Media Success Summit 2012.

One of the keys to successful social media crisis mitigation is pre-crisis planning. This is lifeguard mode, and there are four elements of it.

1. Buy some binoculars.

It’s hard to deal with a crisis you can’t find. Your organization needs some sort of social media listening software. See this post on the five categories of social media software for some options.

2. Set a listening protocol.

That software, however, is only good as its operator. Your organization must have a listening protocol. Who is listening to social media? When does he listen? For what is he listening? Who covers nights and weekends?