How to identify and respond to a media crisis

A popular account posts a negative tweet about your company. Then news aggregation site runs an article about it.

Is this a crisis that merits a response, or should you let the incident ride and fade out on its own?

Knowing when you’re in a full-blown crisis – and when you’re not – can be one of the most difficult things for communicators to determine. When every negative social media post seems like an emergency to be squashed, responding with too damage control can wind up creating more noise around the incident and drawing it out. Conversely, being unprepared or slow to respond can leave you flat-footed while a story spins out of control.

In a recent webinar presented by Ragan and NewsWhip, “How Media Monitoring Can Calm a Crisis,” presenters Paul Quigley, co-founder and CEO of NewsWhip, and Christopher Rivera, a director on the Corporate Reputation team at Samsung Electronics America, discussed how to prepare for, identify and respond to crises that involve your company when they pop up in the news and on social media.

You can watch the full webinar on-demand any time.

How to prepare

Neither Quigley nor Rivera advocate having a rigid, one-size-fits-all plan for a crisis.