It’s all in this week’s top five most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media:

• PeekYou rates the 50 most influential social media experts
• Can you run a social campaign in just 20 minutes a day?
• McDonald’s finds itself embroiled in “a hashtag horror show”
• Should social media pros be paid extra for after-hours tweets?
• Long sales funnels require looking beyond Facebook and Twitter

Image credit: narvikk, via iStockphoto

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This week, we asked: If a social media public relations crisis were to hit your brand tomorrow, do you think you would be prepared to respond effectively? The results:

• We have the capacity to respond, but there’s no formal plan in place: 63.81%
• We wouldn’t know it was happening until we read about it in the media: 15.24%
• Yes, we have a well-documented social media crisis-control strategy: 15.24%
• We’re monitoring social channels but lack the capacity for a response: 5.71%

If it can happen to McDonald’s, it can happen to you. The fast food chain recently found itself in hot water after its promoted trend on Twitter was turned into an opportunity to mock the company. McDonald’s pulled the trend after two hours. Some people have criticized the brand for ending up in that position in the first place, but think about how much worse things could have been if the company hadn’t been aware of how users were responding to the promoted trend and willing to take quick, decisive action. Two hours is long enough that pulling the trend isn’t a knee-jerk reaction, and the company didn’t make the mistake of trying to feed the trolls — engaging in rational debate with people who are out only for attention. But the company acted early enough to keep the abuse from truly going viral — and its response since then has been consistent and appropriate. You can argue about whether the company should have used the promoted trend at all, but once things began to go south, its response was right on point.

But what about you? If your social media presence were hijacked or a damaging news story broke about your company or a customer service complaint started to go viral, would you be prepared to respond in a cool, disciplined manner? Most of you say you’ve got the means to respond but no plan for how you’d react. And that’s a problem. Because when it comes to social media, he who hesitates is lost. Speed is important, but so is consistency and calm. And those are attributes you can get only from having a well-considered social media crisis-response plan.

Maybe it’s the word “plan” that frightens people. This doesn’t have to be a major undertaking: Having a social media crisis plan means everyone knows his or her role. If you don’t have a plan yet, try asking yourself:

• Who is supposed to be monitoring social channels for signs of trouble? How is the person doing this?
• If something went wrong, who would have the authority to respond?
• If that person is unavailable, how is that authority delegated?
• What kind of negative reaction does the company need to respond to, and which ones are better left alone?
• What’s the official company line for common complaints about the brand?

Now, knowing the answers to those questions isn’t the same as having a social media plan. But it’s a start. You can hammer out the answers to those questions in an afternoon meeting and use them as provisional guidelines while you work on a more formal plan. That way, you won’t be caught flatfooted, even if trouble comes looking for you.

How are you preparing to respond to negative publicity on social media channels?

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But that’s just what McDonald’s is doing every day, and social media is playing a big part in that. In his recent BlogWell presentation, Joe Curry shared the details behind the company’s global “Voice of McDonald’s” challenge, an “American Idol”-like contest that relies heavily on social media to discover and promote the most talented employees.

The contest led to 685,985 votes and 1.1 million video views in 2009 alone — all from employees. A few of Curry’s key points about the program:

• Your employees can be your best brand ambassadors. Too often, marketers forget to look at the people on their payroll when looking for talkers and evangelists. Not every employee will want to be a brand advocate, but the ones who do are likely to be among your brand’s biggest fans.
• Make it easy to share. Curry and his team used tools such as Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr to make it easy to share the contest. Because the campaign was about activating employees all over the world, these universal tools made it easy for lots of people to talk (in lots of languages).
• Get early buy-in from legal. Curry recommends involving your legal team from the beginning. Earning their early support on big communication projects means fewer surprises and headaches down the road.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And if you like this presentation, be sure to check out our upcoming BlogWell in Philadelphia on Nov. 9.

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Here are a few great ideas from Heather Oldani, senior director of communications and Steve Wilson, senior director of global web communications for McDonald’s, on how McDonald’s is using social media at all levels of the organization:

• It’s not a department that owns social media, it’s the consumer. Rather than having one team “own” social media, lots of departments collaborate on it at McDonald’s, including creative, customer satisfaction, legal, and brand content.

• Fostering existing communities is key. Heather explained how one of the hardest things for McDonald’s to learn was that the adage, “If you build it, they will come” isn’t necessarily true.

• Some of the biggest opportunities in social media are internal. McDonald’s Mindshare community helps owner-operators share ideas with one another. One of Steve’s favorite examples was how an owner in Italy used it to share a simple way to remove fingerprint stains from doors and windows with other McDonald’s owners around the world.

See the live presentation here:

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