Hey, mCommunity!

In this product rookie tip, I’ll guide you through leveraging Meltwater to proactively monitor potential crises, allowing you to focus more on refining your response plan rather than reactive damage control. 

A crisis can significantly impact any organization. Some examples of crises our clients monitor with Meltwater include:

• Threats of violence on school campus/property
• Cyber attacks or data leaks 
• Product recalls
• Extreme weather or natural disasters
• Stock market crashes
• Construction or workplace accidents 
• Strikes and labour disputes 
• Lawsuits 
• Public scandals or brand damage 
• Pandemics or disease outbreaks

The effectiveness of your crisis response plan hinges largely on the specific situation you aim to address, and a well-thought-out response strategy starts with identifying the potential risks your organization may face.

Smart Alerts are a valuable tool for staying informed about relevant events specific to your company or industry. Setting up alerts for Company Events or Industry Events are straightforward and do not require a saved search in Explore. Simply enter the name of a company or industry in the search bar (you can select up to 10 companies for one Company Event alert) and choose from various event types to receive notifications, as shown in the screenshot below.

Other alert types commonly used for crisis monitoring include Spike Detection, Sentiment Shift, X Influencers, Top Reach, and Every Mention. However, these alerts require criteria from a saved search within Explore.

Let’s go back to: the effectiveness of your crisis response plan hinges largely on the specific situation you aim to address. For this example, let’s consider a scenario where you want to monitor product recalls affecting your brand. In Explore, open a new Advanced Search and begin the first string of your boolean query with your organization’s name and related variations, social handles, hashtags, and common misspellings. Then, create a second Boolean string with keywords and phrases specific to product recalls, linking the two with the AND operator. For instance: ("First Aid Beauty" OR "First-Aid Beauty" OR "FirstAid Beauty" OR @FirstAidBeauty OR @firstaidbeauty) AND ("product recall" OR "taken off shelves" OR "taken off the shelf" OR "contamination" OR "allergic reaction*" OR "adverse irritation" OR "packag* defect*")

oResource: Boolean for Crisis Management]

Keep in mind that there are nuances to this. If your organization is commonly referred to by its acronym or is a widely used term, your search results might include some false positives or irrelevant mentions. However, you’ve likely already built out a solid brand mentions search, avoiding the noisy chatter. In this case, a recommendation is to duplicate this search and apply the crisis boolean as a custom category (inclusion) instead, ensuring your results are targeted to your crisis. Be sure to rename and save this search accordingly. 

Once your search is set up, you’ll configure your alerts. Select Alerts on the left-hand navigation bar of Meltwater, and hover over the i icon for more insights, or refer to understanding alert types from the help center.

Integrating your alerts with internal comms tools such as Slack or MS Teams will ensure that your team remains well-informed and ready to respond promptly in a crisis. Additionally, consider downloading the Meltwater Mobile App for on-the-go readiness. 

While we hope you rarely encounter a crisis, being prepared with these monitoring tools equips you and your team with many hands on the pulse allowing you to be able to mitigate the impacts quickly and effectively. 

How are you utilizing Meltwater’s Explore for your crisis monitoring efforts?

Until next time!

Julia