Volkswagen Crisis On Social Media Hits Fever Pitch

How to Asses The Decline In Sentiment During A Crisis Within 15 Seconds

The Volkswagen crisis has come out of nowhere. Within days a 3rd of the value of the company has been wiped out already. Social media is at fever pitch, which roughly translated means “a state of intense excitement and agitation”. So how bad is the agitation?

[Tweet “How to Asses The Decline In Sentiment During A Crisis Within 15 Seconds – @Jedi_roach”]

There is an app for that! Every week I use the Radian6 mobile app to do quick scans and I can get results within 15 seconds. I have used it while being asked questions on the phone and being able to give immediate answers on the rate of climb or decline of the mentions graph in the early stages of a mini crisis. This is what I found by just using the word “Volkswagen” and the Radian6 app from Salesforce:

The key takeaways for me after 15 seconds:

519% increase in mentions within a few days. Crisis is at fever pitch.
55% drop in sentiment. Can it get worse?
Words being associated with the brand like “scandal” and “fraud” mean trouble ahead.
The top countries indicate the places to get started to put the fire out.

What Is Being Associated With The Hashtag

I also looked at what was being associated with #Volkswagen..

Key takeaways:

#dieselgate
#vwgate
#pollution
#fraude
#greenpeace

The Crisis Plan

[Tweet “Crisis time is not the time to have an intern running your social media accounts – @jedi_roach”]

You are at the start of a crisis, you have used your normal processes to assess the problem and it is clear that it is time to get the crisis team in place.
This is when you look back and say “thank goodness we created a social media crisis plan after carrying out a risk assessment“ like this one (Sprinklr) which features a crisis matrix

A list of the risks that threaten your organization
An outline of how to respond and resolve those risks (called a crisis response model)
A crisis scoring matrix
Tactics for handling different kinds of crises

The Crisis Roles

Lastly, what roles should be appointed? Now is not the time to have an intern running your social media accounts. We have seen what can happen if interns are the only ones who have the keys to the accounts. The Sprinklr crisis download has a section about the possible crisis roles to have on the crisis team:

Crisis team leader
Crisis analyst
Content specialist
Crisis community manager

Each company must asses what is right for them when it comes to resources and shared roles.

The Next Move…

I expect that as I write this post that Volkswagen have assembled their crisis team and PR people and are no doubt working hard on understanding what to do next. It is another reality check for the rest of us to think what would we do next if we were in their shoes.

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Clive Roach

Social media marketing expert with +15 years’ experience. Creates and deploys strategy, social listening, tactical planning, analytics, campaign calendar management, all while achieving revenue opportunities and cost savings.

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