6 Features to Include Within Your Internal Communications Platform

In order to overcome a social media crisis quickly and efficiently, you’re going to need all the help you can get! Aside from leveraging the help of your still-happy fans and followers (which I talk about here), it’s important to have your entire staff assist in helping you regain control of the crisis in the least amount of time possible.

The companies who’ve involved their employees and invoked their help during a crisis have been the quickest to recover and to see the most opportune outcome. Take Boingo and the Red Cross for example. Both of these brands overcame what could have been an enormous social media crisis in minimum time and with impeccable results due to the fact that they were quick to react and empowered their staff to assist in handling and resolving the crisis.

We’ve seen this saying before:

“Every employee is a public relations representative and crisis manager for your organization, whether you want them to be or not.” – Jonathan Bernstein

And it was as true the day Jonathan said it as it is today.

So how can you facilitate your life and invoke measures that will allow you to communicate efficiently with your staff in the time of a crisis?

The answer is to take the time to set up a strategic internal communications platform before you find yourself faced with a social media crisis (or a crisis of any kind) and to take the proper measures to make sure that your entire team understands both how to use it, as well as how their expected to use this platform during a crisis.

If you’ve already got an internal communication platform developed and implemented for your company then bravo! But you may still want to cross-reference with the following list of features that today’s digital and real-time crises call for.

Features of a well balanced and strategic internal communications platform

Two-way communication
Within a crisis, you’ll need to address your staff and make sure that they’re equipped with all information and details of the events unfolding in real-time. You’ll also want to make sure that they can communication with you and your crisis team when necessary. Making sure that your internal communication platform is set up with two-way communication functionality will prove itself to be extremely beneficial during a crisis.

A couple tools that enable two-way conversations:

• Blog – be sure to always enable comments
• Forum

The ability to upload .pdf’s and video
This way you can upload policies, legal documents, tutorial videos and many more useful tools that may be needed during a crisis. Trust me, you’ll be relieved that your staff has easy access to these documents and tools during an attack!

Search function
An internal search bar helps you locate necessary documents and content within seconds, as well as helps employees find answers to questions that may have already been answered in the past.

Note: Make sure that your search bar is capable of finding .pdf documents, Word documents, Excel documents, videos and any other type of document you may need to upload to your platform.

Notifications and alerts
It’s important that your team be notified in real-time each time you publish something to your internal communication platform.

Easy and efficient to manage
Your internal communication platform needs to be easy and efficient to manage. This includes, but is not limited to: uploading documents, adding content, rearranging menus, editing existing content and more.

Password protected
Your internal communication platform holds many exclusive documents that should be kept within the organization. By enabling your platform to be password protected you’ll allow yourself the opportunity to control who has access to such content, and who sees what content within the platform.

My personal internal communications platform recommendation

The best platforms that I’ve seen (and helped create for clients) has been a private intranet, developed using the WordPress platform. WordPress enables you to include all above features and functionalities, as well as many more depending on your brand’s individual needs.

Who should have access to your internal communication platform?

The correct answer here is: every single member of your staff. Crises have been known to escalate when members of the staff were not kept in the loop. Many different repercussions can result in these circumstances, such as:

• Employees getting upset because they don’t understand the situation and blame the organization
• Employees not understanding their roll within the crisis, therefore answering questions that are better answered by the crisis team
• Employees not being aware that there is a crisis taking place

Not only is it crucially important for your employees to be aware of the crisis as it unfolds, but to also feel as though they’ve played a valid part in it’s recovery. Your employees care about your organization and want to see it succeed, so empower your staff with the right tools before a crisis so that they may help you recover from one when the time comes.

Is your organization equipped with an internal communication platform, and if so what features have you included within your platform that you feel are necessary in helping you survive a social media crisis? Share your comments with me below!