If your company has a crisis, how will you use social media to communicate with your customers?

The essence of social media is talking to people at an individual level rather than pushing your  corporate messages at them, but can you afford to be personal at all times?

Australian airline Quantas experienced this problem after grounding their worldwide fleet recently. Normally an excellent example of a company using social media, they faced criticism that their communication on Twitter became too corporate during this crisis.

But how can a company hope to respond to individuals when a huge number are faced with problems?

Managing the complaints about your handling of the handling of the crisis is becoming an increasingly common problem.

Crisis communications and social media

• Is social media part of your crisis response plan? Who will curate your channels and are you ready for team members posting their own comments and updates on their personal channels?
• Manage your fans and followers expectations. If you are not going to respond to individual queries for a period of time, tell them and explain why.
• Make note of what people are asking; these are the questions they are going to what answered eventually.
• Post a latest news page on your website and try to answer the frequently occurring questions here; tell people when it will be updated so they know that they are not missing out on information

Have you used social media to communicate during a crisis? What worked for you?