By Alex Owiti
Corporates can no longer ignore digital platforms. An issue could erupt on a popular social media platform. It could take the form of complaints about a product or service, or reactions to a brand’s communication regarding sensitivities to gender, a group of people, or culture. It is always sparked by a tweet or comment on Facebook, or Instagram before it spreads like bushfire.
At this point, salvaging the situation calls for remedies to quell the fire and ensure that the reputation of the brand in question remains intact. However, when a brand is attacked on social media, some of its reputation is eroded, and depending on the magnitude of the crisis, recovery may not be quick, due to the damage from negative sentiments.
Before the digital era, a crisis erupted from a scandal or leakage in the media. At that point, a befitting way to salvage the situation was seeking the right of reply or preparing a holding statement to counter the claims. But, the turnaround was always very slow. This calls for the need to leverage technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Today digital platforms offer opportunity for prompt response and direct engagement with the public as well as the aggrieved party. They provide room to arrest the situation and deal with it in time. However, many brands often ignore a social media complaint, depending on its aggressiveness or the size of the complainant’s following. The issue could escalate in no time if taken lightly, based on its gravity and interest on social media. Here are smart tips to consider when dealing with crisis on digital platforms:
Besides monitoring the propagators, it is important to think about the reach – the number of people likely to see or hear the message, and how much influence (authority) the propagator has over the intended audience, level of aggression, and hostility of the propagator.
Message and audience – how much engagement or discussion is generated on social media, by which audiences, and whether the message targets them directly.
Mobilization – if the message encourages people to act.
Risk level – when it is low – there are less than 10 to 30 posts per hour-low influence, users with their network size or followers with less than 200 to 1000 members, moderate – user has 1500 to 3000 followers, medium-size user has 50000 unique visitors weekly. Stories are picked by high-users with more than 3000 followers -60 times retweeted within an hour.
Use listening tools on social media like Hootsuite, Canvas, Google Alerts, Brand24, Tweetdeck, Sprout Social, and Brandwatch.
Therefore, social media managers should integrate AI into their social media platforms if they are to transform communication, monitor, evaluate, and manage issues and crises online promptly.
AI-augmented softwares can (today) monitor and evaluate the gravity of an issue being escalated online. It can also analyze sentiments, negative or positive, and issue alerts on the levels. Just like in an ocean storm management system, oceanographic experts would churn out reports on an hourly or minute basis to predict the extent of expected destruction. As a result, disaster management and preparedness systems are deployed to prevent, or reduce the damage by issuing an advisory for evacuation.
Similarly, AI can adopt the same strategies and save brands from extensive reputational damage. Such systems are available to help prepare for any issue that may escalate into a crisis. As a brand you can plan accordingly and institute strategies to cushion yourself from a barrage of reputational damage.
Furthermore, as part of big data analytics, AI enables brands to collect and collate information that can be used for future plans and strategies. In the end, AI systems will help brands to save on cost and even be more profitable because they have safeguards on their reputation.
A latest report by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) shows that 12% of a public relations practitioner’s total skills (out of 52 skills) could be complemented or replaced by AI, with a prediction that this could climb to 38% by 2023.
Today, ‘assisted writing’ is supported by CHAT GPT, a capable chatbot built on Generative Pretrained Transformer 3 (GPT-3.5), a so-called Large Language AI processing model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text-based content.
It is interesting how Open AI’s ChatGPT tool gained one million users within a week after its launch on November 30, 2022. By the end of January 2023, this had risen to 100 million global users.
According to CIPR, given that writing is still one of the most prevalent required skills for any PR professional of any level of seniority or experience, it isn’t hard to see how ChatGPT may impact this aspect of practice. ChatGPT and similar tools such as Jasper AI can create written public relations content of any kind – press releases, email pitches, messaging, etc.
“When it comes to the use of artificial intelligence, in particular, large language models like GPT-3 and the ChatGPT interface, what these models are good at is transforming inputs. Large language models, in general, are nothing more than massive statistical probability matrices. A word is told by the company it keeps,” communications and AI practitioner Christopher Penn, said in the CIPR report.
This means that these tools and models understand language only to the extent of the statistical distributions of the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that they appear in. That is why they can replicate grammar very well because grammar is nothing more than statistical distributions of words. They are autocomplete on steroids.
Telling a large language model to write a blog post about social media marketing can generate extremely bland, average content. Telling it to generate social media content about engagement rates on TikTok about time of day and gender is going to give you more specific content because the large language model itself can understand, based on the additional words you have provided, more of the context. It is drawing from additional statistical probabilities from those words – a word is known by the company it keeps.
However, what these tools produce is still a statistical average of what they’ve been trained on. They are not going to produce anything original because they can’t by definition. But, what if you don’t want average? What if you aspire to more than mediocrity? What role do these tools play?
Here’s the part everyone is overlooking: AI tools are better at refining than creating, and that’s the secret we need to understand to unlock their power. It is simply because these models – their technical name is transformers – are adept at taking in inputs and transforming them into outputs, they are just better at refining text than they are creating it.
In conclusion, AI and big data analytics are today’s critical tools that help a business or brand make critical decisions especially when it comes to monitoring issues and crises during this digital era. Corporates must invest heavily in such tools to safeguard their brands from costly recovery processes that come after a stormy crisis because an issue was ignored or arrested late. – Alex Owiti is a PR consultant.
