e provide PR and corporate affairs teams with advice, tools and techniques to help them understand and navigate fast-moving issues on social media that have the potential to cause serious reputational damage.
The nature of social networks means organisations need eyes and ears everywhere to be alert to the risk of tweets, photos, videos or conversations that can explode in minutes into a full-blown PR crisis.
And public relations teams need ways to harness their combined experience, knowledge and curiosity to quickly get their heads round an emerging issue and decide what to do. The challenge is all the greater because of what the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer describes as the growing “epidemic of misinformation” that
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makes it hard to separate fact from fiction on social and even mainstream media.
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News media are constantly scanning social media looking for anything they can turn into clickbait – often at the cost of someone’s reputation. Campaigners, single interest groups and fake accounts have become adept at finding ways to weaponise social media and fuel the flames of online outrage.
It means teams responsible for reputation management need to be one step ahead – constantly horizon-scanning, constantly on top of what their customers and stakeholders are saying and seeing on social media. And as adept as the campaigners at using social media – in the PR team’s case to mitigate any reputational damage and find ways to drive and amplify authentic positive conversations about their brands.
How Asda’s PR team use Shooglebox to manage risks and opportunities
At any normal time the PR team at Asda, one of the UK’s big supermarket chains, are dealing with lots of fast-moving events and issues. But these are far from normal times. Covid, food poverty, Brexit and the growth of aggressive single-issue campaigning on social media have meant finding even more effective ways to keep on top of what people are saying and seeing.
​Shooglebox has become central to the way the Asda PR team anticipate, analyse and deal with emerging reputational risks. And, just as importantly, it helps them pick up on the many positive things customers are saying about Asda and turn them into heart-warming stories that regularly go viral on Facebook.
Harness the combined curiosity and wisdom of your team
There are lots of social media monitoring and listening tools that help brands look out for mentions and keywords on Twitter and other public networks, with dashboards, graphs and analytical components to track numbers, trends and sentiment.
They can be powerful tools but on their own they’re not enough for a PR team grappling with complex, fast-moving issues.
A lot of conversations and comments on social media and news sites are not picked up by automated listening tools. With Facebook, for example, they’re only able to see the tip of the iceberg – most conversations are hidden through privacy settings or in local groups and pages.
It takes real detective work to get to the heart of an emerging issue and track down information
and insights that don’t pop up in searches and live feeds.
Shooglebox complements automated listening tools by giving teams a place to quickly gather lots of additional material from multiple different sources and review it all in a highly visual at-a-glance grid.
It lets inhouse and agency PR teams quickly apply their collective curiosity to throw the net as wide as possible then stand back and explore the things they’ve found. We show teams how to use Shooglebox to get multiple perspectives on the issue at hand, avoid groupthink and come up with an unbiased view of the facts and context.
Shooglebox also makes it easy to explain, present and back up your decisions and recommendations by giving others access to curated, read-only views of your supporting research.
Gather material together faster
Work together to pool information quickly from different sources – saving links to web pages, social media posts and conversations. The best PR teams don’t accept the obvious quick answers. They apply their curiosity to dig deeper and root out information and insights others miss.
Add context and thoughts
Everything you squirrel away is represented by a card with an at-a-glance front and full material on the back where team members can add notes and background information. You can create cards from scratch too – capturing some thoughts or a topic to come back to.
Set up live auto feeds
Keyword driven live feeds of social posts and web articles automatically create stacks of cards you can dip into as a start point for further investigation. These are useful when you know the keywords you want to look out for or the type of people to keep an eye on.
Explore as a team
Review everything you’re gathering in an at-a-glance visual grid view that helps you spot insights, connections and gaps for more exploration. It’s like having a wall where you’re able to stick up cuttings, printouts and Post-It notes, then stand back to sort and make sense of it all.
Get everyone's heads together
Shooglebox works well with remote working tools like Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams. An example: When you jump on a Zoom call to review the issue you’re researching one member of the team can share their screen, pull up Shooglebox and use it as everyone talks about the key things they’ve found.
Show your workings
Whatever your final output – a report, an email, a Powerpoint deck – you can share a link to a read-only view of all the things you’ve curated in your exploration. If you’re summarising what people are saying about a topic or issue it’s a great way to show it visually at a glance.
Grow and preserve corporate memory
A corporate affairs team relies on retaining knowledge of past issues, successes and mistakes to improve decision making and problem solving. Shooglebox can act as a visual bookshelf where the team keep all the things they know will come in handy one day – and avoid starting again from scratch.
Get in touch
If you'd like to learn more about Shooglebox for teams, use this form to get in touch