A customer's complaint about my product just went viral on social media, what do I do in the first few hours?
The first six hours decide the narrative, after that, virality takes the wheel and you're reacting to a story instead of shaping it, so post a quick, honest acknowledgment ('we've seen this, we're looking into it, here's when you'll hear more') even before you have full facts, rather than going silent while legal drafts a statement. Get the facts internally in parallel, what actually happened, how many customers are affected, is there a real safety issue, because your second post needs to be substantive, not just another 'we hear you'. Silence and generic corporate language are what turn a single bad complaint into a pile-on; a fast, human, specific response is what stops it.
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A structured, step-by-step playbook rather than a list of horror stories, the closest thing to a checklist you can actually follow in the first hour of a crisis.
Written by a social-listening/CX platform, so it's unusually practical about the monitoring and detection side of crisis management, not just the response messaging.
A round-up of real, recent crisis situations across brands, useful for pattern-matching your own situation against what's actually happened rather than theorising in the abstract.
