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To help your business manage the inevitable risks associated with online and social media, an online issues log is a vital tool. This is how to set one up and use it.
Benjamin Franklin once wrote that nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes. However, if Benjamin was around to see the phenomenon that is digital / social media, I think he would add a third certainty to his list. That is: at some stage, every brand that engages via digital and social media will experience an issue or crisis of some description.
I don’t mean to come across as a scaremonger. The fact that issues have and will occur shouldn’t keep you from engaging online with your key stakeholders. It is important to be alert but not alarmed, as they say.
With some careful planning and adherence to set processes and procedures, you can mitigate some of the known risks your business faces and also prepare to deal with the unknowns. This helps ensure that when your brand encounters an issue (and not every incident is a crisis) you are prepared to respond appropriately, in a manner that minimises reputational damage to your brand and business.
The following are just two key areas of online risk management to focus on. Of course, there are others: ensuring you have a clear social media policy, for example. For more about how to develop a policy, see our previous blog post on the topic.
Step one – planning and process
- Establish an issues log relating to online communication risks. Pre-populate it with any known (‘most likely’) risks and those that are less likely but still feasibly anticipated. The log should outline the likelihood of the risk; likely timing or triggers for an adverse event if known; your ability to mitigate the risk and how; its potential impact; the action required to address it if the issue does occur and who should ‘own’ the task of addressing the various risks the log contains.
- Online reputation risks should then be tracked and managed by a team/task force using the issues log, with updating the log a specific responsibility of a key person. Updates should be regular and the log’s content shared with the relevant social media crisis & issues management team.
- The relative risk profile of social channels should drive your resource allocation. If your Facebook page is primarily a recruitment tool but you connect with external stakeholders primarily on Twitter – where they can publicly air any grievances quickly and easily – you may want to focus more of your time and resources managing your Twitter account.
Step two – monitoring and tracking
- As we have mentioned in earlier blogs, having an online rapid response and crisis management capability established and tested is pivotal. Regular ‘dry runs’ will test each person and the team on a whole in terms of their response time and will also highlight any areas that need improvement , such as bottlenecks in the sign-off process.
- You should also engage in real-time monitoring that is linked to business and reputation risk data / systems. This will allow you to pick up on any issues quickly and to respond promptly and appropriately.
- Finally, your business may already have a crisis and issues management plan and you may be confident that you already have the procedures in place to effectively deal with issues that arise. However, if your issues management system and plan doesn’t include online you are missing a vital part of the entire plan!
As we all know, any company that isn’t engaging with stakeholders online is potentially missing out on a number of key engagement and business opportunities.
And, by the same token, any company that doesn’t have an online social media component in their reputation risk management plan is operating in a pre-digital, Benjamin Franklin world.
