Crisis Management  Social Media Simulator

Is your company ready for a social media crisis?

As all too many organisations have recently seen, it can be a matter of hours before a company issue can become a full-scale crisis for your brand. And it’s not just the damage to your reputation that is costly. It’s also the behind-the-scenes repair efforts for marketers and communications teams that can eat up hours and de-rail carefully planned campaigns.

Rehearsing a crisis

Most big brands will prepare for a crisis. Rehearsing one is a different story. Crisis management plans can’t prepare you for the reality of responding to an angry mob on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube to manage your online communities and protect your brand’s reputation.

If you want to see how a live crisis plays out, join us at our free crisis simulation workshop in New York on 19 June.

How our crisis simulation training works

Our Social Media Simulator lets you experience the closest thing to managing a live crisis on social channels. Together with PR agency Carrot Communications, we have created a proprietary online social media simulation tool, which mimics how a crisis would unfold over social media.

Our crisis team:

  • Creates a real-world crisis scenario, with different stages to it. The crisis story is tailored to each brand, and takes a realistic situation your brand is likely to face
  • Lets you experience the live drama of how that crisis would unfold over social media channels, including: news sites, blog posts, forums, and social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube)
  • Runs a ‘live’ simulation of the crisis using our online software, so your comms or crisis team can practice how to respond over each channel
  • Provides trained community managers to mimic the public response in real-time, so you can see how the ‘public’ are responding to your crisis management strategy
  • Runs a sentiment and performance score to measure how well you’re managing the crisis over each channel
  • Provides live training to give you advice on how to manage each community to minimise damage to your brand’s reputation, and how to avoid inflaming the situation
  • Will provide recommendations for any social media policy changes

Your crisis team:

  •  Will leave the session armed with actionable advice and tools to integrate social media in to existing crisis plans

There are two options for using the simulator, but we can tailor the training to your brand’s needs.

Option 1: social media crisis simulation and training

This is a workshop-based simulation and training exercise, either for a small group (such as a senior management team) or for bigger teams (such as communications or legal teams) of up to 150 people. Larger groups will be split into teams and the session can be run simultaneously for several groups in multiple locations.

Option 2: social media support during a full operational crisis simulation

We can provide the social media element of a full crisis simulation alongside other relevant media in line with your existing crisis policies and processes. This can be done as part of your company’s media training.

Here’s what Jonathon Hemus, from Insignia Communications, had to say about the simulator:

My experience of running social media crisis exercises in Europe, the US and Asia using the simulator demonstrates its enormous value. Indeed, delegates from global businesses have described it as the most powerful training experience of their entire careers.”

… you can read his full review here.

Our blog post on rehearsing a social media crisis tells you what to expect in more detail.

Please contact us to discuss any aspect of the simulator, or social media crisis planning and management.