Tick-tack, tick-tack. Nowadays, information flows and is shared by hundreds, thousands or millions of people at a dizzying speed and in uncontrollable proportions. If this information has the potential to negatively impact – or even destroy – your brand, you should better set the clocks and automatically enter in ‘crisis management’ mode.
Contingency plans are important, since they can help us predict and understand how to react to known or potential “reputational fires”. However, the timing and vigor of our response are critical success variables in this type of operations. According to Crisp’s The 2019 Crisis Impact Report, “53% of consumers expect a response from a brand within an hour after a crisis and one in three (34%) expect a response within 30 minutes.”
While social media helps to propagate brand-damaging content, it can also be a powerful weapon to solve credibility and reputation crises. In such moments, it should be stressed, a success story is not enough. You have to act and act well and quickly. In fact, as Crisp concludes, “the speed at which the public receives these messages could be the difference between crisis escalation or resolution (…) with 90% saying that they would likely buy again from a brand that responds well to crises.”