How to Measure Crisis Performance? [2024]

It’s February 2022. Slack, one of the top chat apps for businesses, experienced a massive outage. Almost nothing worked: you couldn’t send messages to your team, join company channels, or upload files. Slack users were frustrated, and it seemed like the crisis might sink the brand.

But it didn’t, and thousands of companies still use this tool! I know that because I just sent my colleague a funny meme about our boss on our hidden channel (please keep it secret).

How did Slack survive? Because their crisis performance was simply astonishing!

Crisis performance is how well your organization handles a challenging and urgent situation. It focuses on making smart moves fast, keeping things under control, and minimizing negative after-effects. Good crisis performance criteria involve pivoting on problem-solving, open & transparent communication, and flexibility.

Slack is a tech company. And when you’re a tech company, f*ckups aren’t a matter of IF they’ll happen, but WHEN they’ll happen. In other words, errors are inevitable.

All you can do is create processes to minimize their negative effects.

Wanna learn what to do if the crisis hits your brand?

In this article, I will briefly explain crisis performance and how to measure it. Vamos!

Table of contents:

• What is crisis performance?
• How to measure crisis performance?
• Benchmark the performance
• Conclusion

What is crisis performance?

Crisis performance is a general term for all the actions taken to minimize the effects of a pending negative situation.

It involves implementing strategies to manage the crisis, communicate effectively with stakeholders, and reduce damage to the brand.

Moreover, crisis performance refers to assessing how well you handled the issue to improve the overall quality of the process.

Measuring crisis performance is necessary to:

• Rate your response effectiveness;
• Improve the crisis management process;
• Stay trustworthy in the eyes of your stakeholders (customers, employees, investors, etc.).

How to measure crisis performance?

To measure crisis performance, you need to track:

• Response Time
• Volume of Negative Mentions
• Reputation Score
• Sentiment Analysis
• Financial Impact

01 Response Time

Crisis response time is absolutely crucial.

It indicates the moment from when the crisis is first identified to when the initial action is taken.

For example, suppose your company faces a data breach. 

In that case, the crisis response time is the period between the moment you first identify the breach and the first action taken to acknowledge it publicly and start addressing it.

Like, your initial response might be to let your audience know that the breach has happened and inform them of the steps being taken to fix the issue and protect their data.

Measuring the effectiveness of your crisis procedures must include checking how timely your initial response was. And, as you probably guessed, the faster your reaction, the better.

Why?

Thanks to the fast crisis response time, you will:

• Minimize the damage because a timely response increases the chance of preventing the crisis from escalating.
  
  
• Meets public expectations because people want immediate communication during a crisis. In today’s hyper-connected world, a slow response can be seen as negligence or indifference.
  
  
• Shows competence because your quick response demonstrates that your organization is well-prepared and takes responsibility. It builds trust among customers and other stakeholders.

02 Volume of Negative Mentions

The second indicator on our crisis performance metrics list is the volume of negative mentions.

As the name suggests, it represents the number of people who shared their bad feelings about you online because of the crisis and your reaction to it.

Naturally, people perceive crises negatively. Therefore, the higher volume of negative mentions is understandable.

What’s important is to keep it as low as possible during the crisis and de-escalate quickly after it.

And when the crisis gets silenced – assess performance to minimize the volume of negative mentions in future crises.

Thanks to tracking negative mentions volume, you will:

• Understand response effectiveness as monitoring negative mentions over time shows how your organization handled the critical communication;
  
  
• Measure the crisis’ impact on your reputation;
  
  
• Reduce the time to de-escalate by implementing actions and answers that worked in your favor.

Okay, and how do we measure negative mentions in practice?

The easiest and most effective way is to use the power of a top media monitoring software like Brand24.

Brand24 is an AI-boosted media monitoring tool that detects, tracks, and analyzes public mentions published on nearly all online sources:

• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, Telegram, and Twitch);
• Podcasts and video platforms;
• News sites, blogs, forums, newsletters, and review sites.

This aims to protect your brand reputation by providing timely insights and detailed reports on your brand mentions.

Let me show you a great example.

I created a project to track all the media mentions of Red Bull – the brand that is mainly known for its energy drink. But not only!

Sports fans worldwide know that the company is strongly engaged in multiple disciplines, including owning & sponsoring the F1 team – Oracle Red Bull Racing.

In February 2024, the team’s president was suspected of inappropriate behavior toward his employees.

I was observing this issue and was sure it would get out of control.

But Red Bull’s comms handled it well!

They quickly dealt with the issue, openly communicated with the public, and took immediate action. This helped keep negative mentions low and protected Red Bull’s reputation.

Below, you can see the rising trend of negative mentions that started on February 19th and suddenly ended on March 3rd.

That’s the line of a successful crisis performance!

Additionally, Brand24’s AI features can streamline your process of crisis performance assessment in multiple ways.

For example, the AI Metrics Analysis summarizes the most important project data in eight essential charts.

They give you a brief and instant overview of the state of your present and past reputation.

Even the first look allows you to identify the primary source of hate. In the case of Red Bull’s pending image crisis, it was Twitter (X).

03 Reputation Score

Reputation Score is definitely one of my favorite crisis performance metrics due to its simplicity.

You can compare it to using the Metro in Tokyo during rush hours.

There are many options for getting from point A to point B. But Tokyo is a huge city, and driving a car there during rush hour is extremely hard.

Except you can jump into the Metro and cross the whole city as quickly & efficiently as possible.

The same story is true with Reputation Score.

In short, it is a unified numerical score representing a brand’s overall online reputation. Reputation Score shows the public’s trust and credibility in your brand or company.

Generally speaking, the more positive reception your brand receives (preferably from influential sources), the higher your Reputation Score.

Right, you could examine all the brand mentions manually and determine how your recent crisis performance impacted your reputation. But with a Reputation Score, you can do it in the blink of an eye.

Look at the chart below.

As we discussed, in February 2024, Red Bull was on the edge of a serious crisis. Their Reputation Score fell from 4 (February 19th) to -22 (March 8th).

However, the brand managed to recover. Red Bull’s Reputation Score had climbed to 14 in just three months.

The brand’s comms should be proud of their crisis performance!

04 Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis is a process of uncovering emotions hidden behind your brand mentions.

It measures whether people talk about you in a positive, negative, or neutral context.

Compared to the Reputation Score, Sentiment Analysis provides a more detailed and nuanced view of public opinion.

As for your crisis performance, Sentiment Analysis offers:

• Real-time insights into how your audience is reacting to your brand during and after the crisis;
  
  
• Detailed knowledge about channels that bring you the most negativity, allowing you to direct your communication to places that are the most harmful to your reputation;
  
  
• Understanding specific challenges driving negative sentiment to help you identify and combat the primary causes of your pending crisis.

Again, to perform a fruitful Sentiment Analysis, you must use a quality media monitoring tool to track as many sources as possible.

As I told you before, Brand24 can analyze mentions and their sentiment from many social and non-social sources.

That’s super important because the more media channels you can track, the more accurate data about sentiment you get. And data accuracy plays a key role here!

You can see the Sentiment chart for the discussed case of Red Bull below.

Besides, Brand24 is advanced enough to explain emotions toward your brand in detail. The tool identifies feelings like disgust, admiration, joy, sadness, anger, and fear.

That allows you to check which negative feelings dominated public opinion during Metrics Analysis with a quick look. Thus, you can tailor your crisis communication more effectively.

05 Financial Impact

Last but not least, every crisis is a huge financial risk for a business. Potentially, you can lose a lot of money. Even everything!

That’s why you should always assess the financial aspects of your temporary problems.

Of course, each organization is different, and finances are too complicated to present the one-and-only approach.

However, some general principles can guide you in assessing the financial impact of a crisis on your business:

1. Revenue changes, so monitoring how the crisis impacted your sales and income sources;
   
   
2. Cost increases because a crisis can cause extra expenses (i.e., on legal fees or crisis management procedures);
   
   
3. The stock price value as investors are focused on their money and actively watch what’s going on around your company;
   
   
4. Market share impact because a severe crisis can make your customers move to your competition.

Tip: Benchmark the crisis performance

There is one bonus question you really should answer after you put out the fire – how did the crisis impact your overall brand performance?

As we discussed, the first step is taking a look at the Reputation Score. It’s a great starting point!

But later, you must get into details.

Thanks to benchmarking crisis performance, you will:

• Know your real crisis recovery status;
• Rate your crisis response effectiveness;
• Optimize your future crisis management plans.

Checking the impact requires having a reference point.

So, the best way to check it is by benchmarking your performance during and after the crisis!

In addition to many services I presented before, Brand24 includes a feature called “Compare Periods”.

It allows you to check the changes in your project by the following criteria:

• The volume of mentions (total, social media, and non-social media);
• Mentions’ sentiment share (positive and negative);
• Mention’s reach (social and non-social);
• Presence Score
• Advertisement Value Equivalency (AVE)
• User-generated content

Let’s go back to our Red Bull example.

I decided to compare the brand’s performance in two periods: April – May (after the crisis) vs. February – March (during the crisis).

As you can see, the total number of mentions dropped by 41% after the crisis. This is usually a very bad signal. All in all, we want people to talk about our brand, don’t we?

Well, only sometimes. Silence is way better than hate.

The key indicators here are positive and negative mentions.

Great news, Red Bull! After silencing your crisis, the share of positive mentions increased by 3%, and the share of negative decreased by 10%!

Conclusion

Crises are almost inevitable.

Sooner or later, your brand will face a difficult situation you must handle.

All you can do is prepare as much as possible. When it hits, you need to monitor your crisis performance closely.

By analyzing response time, the volume of negative mentions, Reputation Score, sentiment analysis, and financial impact, you can gain incredibly valuable insight into how effectively you managed the crisis.

These insights will help minimize the effects of a current crisis and prepare for future ones.

Final thoughts:

• Measuring crisis performance strengthens your stakeholder’s trust and protects your brand’s reputation.
• Remember to benchmark your crisis performance – it will help you understand your strengths and areas for quality improvement.
• Media monitoring tools like Brand24 are fantastic for tracking and analyzing most of the key crisis performance metrics.

Better safe than sorry! Start the Brand24 free 14-day trial and learn how to minimize the impact of the crisis on your brand!