Search and social media are two fast converging marketing techniques and there is a major opportunity for small to medium businesses to leverage them together.
But let's face it: there may be a couple hurdles on your way to that golden destination, like a good old PR crisis...
There again, however, the winning duo of search and social media can be a great asset.
With social media, both positive and negative voices are today more audible, and with search engines they can be found even long after the conversation ended.
So the overarching principle is that you should not face an online PR crisis unprepared - you have to plan it ahead.
Obviously you will never know when it will occur and what it will be about - that is the intrinsic definition of a crisis, but by following the following steps you should be fit to handle the crisis and its aftermaths.
1. Do Your Desk Research
It is obviously critical identify where discussions about your brand and industry are taking place online. There are certainly some iconic vertical portals or blogs, but you need to think broader.
For example it is critical to know the key online publications which cover the sector, but have you thought about other sites where travellers are gathering and discuss about their trip... the latter may surface additional relays of opinion that you should engage with.
Because the aim of this early stage is to map out who has a voice and who you should liaise with today, outside of any immediate need. If you create a bind with someone they are more likely to help you in times of trouble than if you were coming to them out of the blue.
2. SEO your CEO
To deliver on this engagement objective, it is important to decide early who your major spokespeople will be and build their legitimacy.
They can be anyone: your CEO, your head of R&D, your community manager... Whoever these people are, they need to legitimate to step forward when they will to deliver the official message.
Building an online reputation in itself is probably worth a couple books, but boiled down to the essential, it consists in being active across the internet by publishing content, commenting on blogs, etc.
3. Establish a Social Charter
Every company should have a policy on how to handle a crisis covering who will intervene, how long your organisation is prepared to wait before responding to negative word of mouth online.
Since it is in the human nature to more easily complain than to glorify, a constant monitoring of the social media spheres will rapidly bring to your attention that there is a lot of people saying negative things about you out there.
You cannot and should not reply to any comment, but you should define when something grows beyond the acceptable, and act upon it. There are numerous solutions to gauge the gauge the public sentiment, and what people are saying about you.
Some are free, some more elaborated are paid-for, but choosing your own will depend on your needs.
4. Optimise Your Actions for the Engines
Everything you do in social media will end up at some point in the search engine result pages. But you need to facilitate this: ensure that your statements are keyword-optimised, that you produce easy-to-share content which can be relayed and seeded across the internet... It will provide you with more managed real estate in the search engine result page if someone searches on the subject of the crisis or your brand.
5. Leveraging Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Invest in some short-term paid-search to assist consumers who are looking for the facts and an official response.
SEO can take time to ramp, whereas PPC is an instantaneous way to sign post your presence. British Airways used this technique during the last Christmas strike threat to point passengers to the official micro website.
Using only SEO was not reactive enough as the destination site was fighting for attention against news updates, press coverage, passenger rants on blogs and forums, etc. By displaying a PPC ad against the keyword "BA Strike" BA ensured the airline was immediately placed at the top of search results.
6. Clean up
Once something has been published on the internet and indexed by the search engine, it is there for ever...
Which means a negative story can be found even after the crisis was successfully managed, and contribute to ignite a sequel. To avoid that, maintain some activity after the crisis is resolved to push down its related information.
This is a basic SEO principle which consists in "owning" the first search results with owned content but it is too often overlooked.
NB: This article is written by Cedric Chambaz, marketing manager for search and SMB at Microsoft Advertising. Download the full search and social media report produced Microsoft and the IAB.
Hat-tip:FreshBusinessThinking