Social media
Crisis communication
Crisis communication is how a brand responds once a negative story starts spreading on its own. It settles who decides, what gets said in the first hour and what is never said at all.
What it means in practice
Start by telling an incident apart from a crisis. One angry comment is ordinary business and belongs in the comment thread, not in a post on your page. A crisis is when people with no connection to you discuss it among themselves, negative mentions grow by the hour, and a journalist gets in touch. If two of those three are true, switch modes. Crisis communication then stops being the social media manager's job and becomes the management's.
Most Slovak companies have one person on social who is also the designer, the copywriter and the support desk. On a Friday evening a thread turns nasty and the boss is on holiday. That is when you find out whether you agreed on a single approver and a deputy. Waiting for five people in a group chat to settle on wording is the costliest line item of the whole thing, and it is paid in trust rather than on an invoice.
In the first hour you do three things in this order: establish the facts, name one approver, publish a short acknowledgement that you know about it. The first reply needs no solution. It needs an admission that you see the problem and a time when you will say more. Then keep that time. Three things are never written: no comment, blaming the customer, and deleting comments that break no rules.
The opposite mistake costs just as much and happens more often. Turning three unhappy comments into an official statement puts the story in front of thousands who would never have seen it. That is not courage, it is amplification. And be wary of agencies selling forty page crisis manuals. Nobody leafs through a document mid crisis. One page with names, numbers and three pre written sentences is what gets used.
We build crisis communication while everything is calm. Two hours with the client, name the three likeliest scenarios for their industry, and write the opening replies in advance. They get stored wherever the account logins live. A rule you can borrow today: put in your phone notes the name and number of the person allowed to approve a statement at nine on a Sunday evening.