Do you have a Moderation Crisis Strategy?

Let’s begin by defining a crisis. A crisis is an event or action that drives a negative reaction toward a brand—even inflicting harm.

A crisis can look different for each brand, and defining what a crisis means for you will depend on your particular priorities, as well as thresholds, triggers, and outcomes that may be brand-specific. Knowing what constitutes a crisis for your brand will enable you to build a more effective social strategy to manage these crises when they occur.

It’s crucial to recognize the distinction between crisis moments: those that are planned and those that are unplanned. Now, the concept of a ‘planned crisis’ might initially seem paradoxical. However, planned crises include events like company mergers, layoffs, or other events that the company can foresee. They could also include global happenings that might affect your brand, such as elections or world sporting events. These scenarios provide an opportunity for crisis planning and establishing workflows to manage all possible outcomes.

Conversely, unplanned crisis moments strike unexpectedly, often escalating rapidly from minor issues to full-blown disasters. Let’s not forget Burger King’s tweet fail or the viral Pepsi X Kendall Jenner commercial. Your strategy for an unplanned crisis will inherently differ from those you can prepare for.

Aligning priorities for crisis moments is an essential step in preparing your brand for a crisis. Priorities change depending on the nature of your brand, and the nature of the crisis. The priority should be to assess the risk associated with the crisis by carefully evaluating the potential impact on brand reputation. Brand protection and customer care should always remain a top priority regardless of the brand or crisis.

Brand-specific crisis priorities will depend on factors such as the business industry, size/prominence, location, and overall company values and goals. After establishing priorities, you can build out SMM platform workflows to support them, leveraging tools such as Khoros Care Tags, Smart Views, and Analytics Dashboards and Alerts.

Preparedness is key in any crisis. That’s why having a clear and efficient escalation plan is vital.

Start by identifying KPIs and the thresholds that will trigger escalation—whether it's channel volume, sentiment percentage, or a specific conversation theme. Tailor these thresholds by channel. For example, you might set a 25% negative sentiment threshold on Instagram and 35% on X (formerly Twitter) due to its tendency toward negativity.

Next, establish a streamlined communication plan. Who will be notified when thresholds are hit? Who approves messaging? Who is responsible for crafting it? These essential questions need clear answers to avoid scrambling in a crisis.

Crisis situations demand pre-planning. Brands that rely on real-time decision-making are at a disadvantage. While unexpected challenges will arise, thorough preparation ensures your team can pivot when needed.

Avoid a "one-size-fits-all" strategy. Different channels require different approaches—your Facebook Group audience may need a more personal touch than your larger Instagram following. Additionally, the type of crisis matters. For example, a PR crisis involving an executive will need a different response than a natural disaster, where pausing content may be the best first step.

Every crisis is unique, and your response strategy should be flexible and adaptive.

In the fast-paced world of social media, having the right tools is essential for efficient crisis management. Here’s a high-level look at some of the most impactful features within Khoros Care:

• Tagging: A foundational step in crisis management, tagging helps organize and monitor conversations. Using the Lucene Rules structure, you can create tags specific to your crisis. These tags allow teams to quickly isolate and manage critical discussions, ensuring they don’t get lost in the noise.

• Smart Views: Building on tags, Smart Views enable non-exclusive segmentation of conversations. For crisis monitoring, Smart Views can combine crisis tags with other data (like sentiment), giving your team a real-time view of key conversations. Post-crisis, you can export this data to keep a long-term record of interactions.

• Crisis dashboards: Crisis dashboards provide a comprehensive overview of the situation, allowing teams to quickly pull reports and monitor the impact. Integrated with Smart Views, these dashboards are essential for tracking the crisis. Threshold alerts can be set to notify your team when a conversation exceeds a defined limit, ensuring no critical issue goes unnoticed.

Using these features enables your team to execute a well-coordinated and effective response during any crisis.

Being truly crisis-ready requires a deep analysis of your brand’s priorities, mastery of SMM platforms, and in-depth scenario planning. It is also crucial to outline the necessary resources ahead of time, align the entire team, and communicate consistently.

Below is a recap of the key tips and takeaways to set your brand up for the highest chance of “success” in crisis moments.

• Build your crisis foundation: Align on what constitutes a crisis for your brand, tailoring your strategy for both channel and crisis type (planned, unplanned).

• Have a clear and concise escalation plan: Understand roles and responsibilities, evaluate communication and approval pathways, and designate KPI thresholds for each crisis category clearly identify of when a crisis might be on the horizon or is currently happening.

• Collaborate with internal stakeholders: Ensure you have legal team approval on messaging, sign-off on decision trees with comms and other stakeholders, and more.

• Leverage technology, such as Khoros Care: Mitigate the stress of a crisis moment by having tools in place that streamline engagement efforts, provide more in-depth analytics, and allow for clear conversation segmentation and tracking.

For more robust, personalized recommendations on building a moderation crisis workflow and utilizing Khoros’ tools to their full potential, the Strategic Services’ Crisis Workflow offering leverages the Strategic Services team’s expertise to create a crisis workstream specific to your brand and its priorities.