social_crisis_response v1.0.0

name: "social_crisis_response" description: "Run a social media brand crisis like a comms professional: first-hour triage, holding statements, and when to apologize vs. stay quiet vs. correct the record. Triggers on reputation threats — viral complaints, outages, scandals, misinformation, pile-ons — affecting a brand or public figure's social presence."

Social Crisis Response

Purpose

Turn a chaotic social-media firestorm into a sequenced, professional response. This skill triages the crisis in the first hour, drafts a defensible holding statement, chooses the right response posture using research-backed crisis communication theory, and keeps everything on the record — while keeping a human in the approval loop for anything public-facing.

It is the crisis escalation point for routine social work: a single complaint is customer care, not a crisis (see triage in references/triage.md).

Workflow

0. Scope. Confirm this is actually a crisis: fast-spreading negative mentions, press pickup, or a trending pile-on — not one angry customer. See references/triage.md for the severity ladder (Low → Medium → High).

1. Freeze and assess (first 15 minutes). See references/first-hour-timeline.md.

• Pause all scheduled/promo posts. Tone-deaf scheduled content during a crisis reads as contempt.
• Establish what is verified, what is unknown, and what is already public. Never communicate a fact you haven't verified.
• Name an incident lead. One voice, one fact sheet.

2. Classify (minutes 15–30). Place the crisis on the responsibility ladder:

• Victim — you're a victim too (tampering, rumor, natural disaster).
• Accidental — you caused harm but unintentionally (technical error, logistics failure).
• Preventable — human error or misconduct you should have stopped. See references/apology-decision.md — prior crisis history bumps you one level more severe.

3. Acknowledge (within the first hour). Publish one timestamped holding statement: what happened, what you know, what you're doing next, and when the next update lands. Templates in references/holding-statements.md. Keep it factual — no cause narrative, no blame assignment, no legal conclusions yet.

4. Respond (hour 1–24). Match the posture to the classification:

• Real failure → rebuild: full, specific apology + concrete corrective action. Never a non-apology ("we're sorry you feel that way").
• Accident → diminish + rebuild: acknowledge, explain the unintentional cause briefly, commit to a fix.
• False claims → correct with evidence: calmly post verifiable facts; never apologize for what didn't happen; don't engage bad-faith actors emotionally.
• Unverified pile-on → stay quiet on details, stay visible: repeat the acknowledgment cadence, correct only what you can prove.

5. Follow through (days 2–30). Progress updates with dated evidence. Centralize everything in one pinned thread/newsroom post so there's a single citable record. Correct stale claims; don't let old answers stand.

Output Contract

| Deliverable | What it contains | |---|---| | incident-facts.md | Verified / unknown / public facts table, incident lead, timestamp | | holding-statement.md | Timestamped statement + next-update time, drafted for human approval | | response-plan.md | Classification (victim/accidental/preventable), posture (deny/diminish/rebuild/correct/stay-quiet), channel plan, monitoring cadence | | follow-up-log.md | Dated updates, evidence, and corrections until resolution |

Operating Rules

1. Human posts, never the agent. Draft everything; a human (and legal/leadership for serious ones) approves and posts. Never publish a crisis statement unilaterally.
2. No invented facts. Every claim in a statement must be verified. Unverifiable = cut it or leave it in "unknown."
3. Never apologize for what didn't happen. A false apology creates liability and erodes trust when the truth comes out.
4. Don't delete. Leave negative comments up unless they violate platform policy — deletion fuels screenshots and anger.
5. Match the apology to responsibility. Under-accommodating a preventable crisis (excuses instead of apology) backfires harder than over-apologizing for an accident.
6. One record. All public communication points back to the single pinned/timestamped thread. No contradictory side replies.
7. Speed ≠ recklessness. The goal is a verified acknowledgment inside an hour, not a perfect explanation. The central question gets answered — fast vagueness that dodges the issue is as bad as silence.
8. Debrief. When resolved, log what happened, what worked, and what the plan missed — before the next crisis.