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snag your free template to put together a complete crisis communication strategy. Use this post as a guide to complete it.

Create a Social Media Crisis Scale Convince and Convert devised a great solution to this problem. They built a customer response flowchart that matches the severity of an issue, to the right course of action.

Crisis Level 1: Isolated customer complaints and questions. Crisis Level 2: Angry customers, broken links, posts directing to the wrong page, factual inaccuracies, major misspellings on social posts. Crisis Level 3: High volume of angry customers, service outages, lack of product availability. Crisis Level 4: Product recalls, defective services or products, widespread negative press coverage, layoffs. Crisis Level 5: Lawsuits, serious accidents resulting in injury, illegal employee conduct.

A crisis creates a vacuum, an informational void that gets filled one way or another. The longer a company or other organization at the center of the crisis waits to communicate, the more likely that void will be filled by critics.

in the two days after the Ethiopian Air crash, Boeing made crisis communications missteps that may have a long-term effect on its reputation and credibility.

Silence is passive and suggests that an organization is neither in control nor trying to take control of a situation. Silence allows others to frame the issues and control the narrative.

"The thing I've tried to do with any client opening up its customer service channels -- you have to have a crisis communications plan mixed with a customer service plan," he said.  "You have to anticipate what will happen. ... Companies that dive in without a plan of attack for those situations are finding it difficult."

"You have to have a lawyer on staff who can be on call and help your social media team craft communications in crisis situations," he said. "When you have a big publicity problem, you have your legal team working hand-in-hand with PR. Why wouldn't you do the same thing in the social media world?"

"Any industry that's heavily regulated will always have a layer of legal and compliance teams that have to be trained, and have to buy in," he said. "It can be done with the right legal team. But if you have a team that constantly says ‘no,’ it'll never work."

The language used is vital. Munoz did not mention the words ‘sorry’ or ‘apology’ in his internal memo, merely expressing his “regrets” that the situation arose.  “You need to think about the ramifications of getting that apology wrong, because often it’s much, much worse if you don’t get the follow-up right. Mistakes happen, but the nature of the company’s response says a lot about their ethics in general,

“All people want to hear is an authentic message and some action that ensures it won’t happen again. Reputations take years to build and seconds to lose. It’s not worth risking anything.”

the first golden rule of corporate apologising is speed: get your say in first to limit the damage and give the impression of owning up to it. Munoz’s letter came nearly 24 hours after the debacle. Then you need to empathise with the people affected – in this case not only the passenger in question, but those around him.  “He hasn’t considered the distress caused to his other passengers here. The problem is bigger than defending the actions of his staff, he needs to apologise to those clearly upset by having to witness the event and feel uncomfortable on his service,”

Don’t Just Apologize, Act They say actions speak louder than words, and the “they” in this scenario, are consumers on social media. When tracking conversations about the Starbucks apology and their announcement to close 8,000 stores in May, we found that there was much more social interest in Starbucks’ action than their carefully worded apology.

71% of the conversation about the Starbucks apology was disgusted with it, as opposed to 38% of those discussing the actions were disgusted with that decision

Both progressive and conservative affiliations use the hashtag #BoycottStarbucks the most. However, those with more progressive leanings are using the hashtag in response to the racial profiling incident itself, whereas conservatives are using the hashtag in response to Starbucks taking a stance against the employee for calling the police, stating that it was an overreaction to the incident. Conservatives are also rattled by the store closures in May.

Some of these were gaffes by clients, others were campaigns by PR and marketing teams that didn’t turn out as planned. The good news is, all these blunders left messes that somebody had to clean up, guaranteeing full employment for crisis response teams.