In previous issues of The Measurement Advisor, we’ve taught you how to use your data to impress your board, get a seat at the table, and show that PR can drive business results. Now we begin a series of articles on how you can profit from your good, clean data.
by Katie Paine — The cleaner your data is, the more useful it is. Clean data allows you to gain quicker and more accurate insights, because your analysis is not polluted with spam and extraneous mentions. Our recent articles on gathering clean data ( “5 Real Life Horror Stories of Bad Data” and “Dirty Data Dooms Measurement: Here Are 5 Tidy-Up Techniques” ) have shown you how to collect data you can be confident in. The next step is to put it to good use.
During a crisis you’ll start receiving hundreds of posts, Tweets, comments, and articles every day — or in some cases every hour. If you are like most PR people, then you’ll probably feel like Hawkeye and Trapper on M.A.S.H. when they hear the words “incoming wounded”: Your adrenaline spikes, your heart pounds, and it seems like the world is coming to an end. The key to dealing with these situation is not to just develop a thick skin, but to have a procedure in place to deal with this incoming onslaught.
Needless to say, managing communications for an airline presents its fair share of challenges and potential crises. Linda Rutherford of Southwest Airlines gave the members of The Conclave some of the best crisis advice I’ve ever heard. Southwest has developed a three-tiered coding system that classifies any potential threat:
- A media crisis: Your typical kerfuffle that will take up a lot of PR time, require a smart measured response, but, if properly handled, will eventually fade away.
- A threat to the brand reputation: An event that has the potential to do long-term damage to the brand, the company’s reputation, and ultimately the trust and relationships that the company has spent years cultivating.
- A financial threat: A material event with potential serious financial downside for the company.
For each of these types of threats Southwest has established a different set of criteria and system of responses. This preparation provides Southwest with greater confidence and control in most crisis situations.
You can learn from Southwest. Your clean data can help you correctly classify every incoming item into crisis-potential buckets. Here’s how.
Identifying and Tracking the Resolution of Low Level Crises
As the your data comes in, keep track of the author, date, and general subject. Then classify each incoming item in the month by its primary subject and severity of potential crisis. Here is a 5-stage example for potential low-level crises:
- Stage 1, Information seeking: For instance, “I haven’t decided what I’m really looking for or whether I’m ready to buy, just asking around.”
- Stage 2, Customer service: For instance, “I’m having a problem with an order can you help?”
- Stage 3, Customer support: For instance, “I’m having a problem with a product I already own can you help?”
- Stage 4, Complaint: For instance, “No one is helping me? I’m dissatisfied with the response.”
- Stage 5, Advocacy: For instance, “I’m still not getting a response and now I’m telling my friends and they’re rallying support against you.”
Up to this point, most of these potential crises could end quite quickly as long as a good, timely solution is applied to whatever the problem is. And then they wouldn’t even make it into the crisis category. To follow the course of these events, you need to track the volume and frequency of related posts to make sure that the crisis is dissipating rather than escalating.
Tracking Serious Crises
When complaints turn into lawsuit or boycott discussions, or when news, rumor, or problems are of a nature to threaten your brand or revenue, then you have a potentially serious crisis on your hands. Events demand a higher level of attention, and your data takes on a new importance. Track the frequency and intensity to determine who and what might be fueling the fire, how serious the threat might be, and to what extent the problem(s) are getting worse.
With luck, you’ve been tracking your data for awhile, so you can look at prior months and compare how the current level of activity compares. For instance, 10 bad tweets in a day is only a crisis if you haven’t seen any tweets at all for the past three months.
You will also want to dig into the data to better understand the authors, their level of influence, reach, and relevance to your target audience. A bunch of teenagers ranting about you matters a lot if you’re a video game maker. But maybe not so much if you’re selling high-end Scotch.
Study the topics that are generating the negative posts or the bad press. Is it something you can actually influence? I recently worked with a client that saw a tremendous spike in negative coverage because they had the misfortune to be the location in which a well-known celebrity took a swing at his girlfriend. This coverage touched off a heated discussion of guns, crime, safety, and misogyny. It was unfortunate that the activity was associated with my client’s location, but there was not much they could do about any of it. On the other hand, if your customers are screaming about your skyrocketing prices and at the same time you’re planning to cut the ribbon on your fancy new headquarters, well then you might want to adjust your timing.
Finally, you need to look at the rest of your market. What’s the competition doing? Is this part of a strategic move on their part to discredit you? Are they being painted with the same dirty brush? It may be that you can turn a market-wide crisis to your competitive advantage.
Managing and planning crisis response is just one way your clean data can help you make better decisions. In the next issue we’ll give you tips on how to use data to ensure your next major event is a raging success. ∞
Image: Seaside, California Fire Department
