The rate of disruption in the digital realm has never been faster than today, and it’s only going to accelerate. That’s because tech keeps getting smarter and smarter, and it’s now at a point where every element of public relations is heavily aided and influenced by it—and it’s particularly true for crisis communication.
Today, organizations face crisis threats more often and of higher significance levels. Information travels much faster than before, and the fake news pandemic seems to only grow more worrisome. That’s why PR professionals have started to rely on AI-powered analytics to study real-time data, which allows them to stay on top of any threats to the reputation of their clients.
With crises becoming scarier and more frequent, the use of intelligent monitoring tools is essential, which is what this article is all about. So, keep reading!
The Rise of Real-Time Media Monitoring
Timing plays a critical role in determining the success rate of crisis communication techniques. According to recent studies, 70% of consumers have an expectation of sub-hour response times on public criticism and queries. But, unless businesses have the right tools at hand, processing copious amounts of feedback so quickly is hardly possible for most brands.
Fortunately, that’s where smart tech comes to the rescue—especially artificial intelligence. AI-based monitoring platforms can simultaneously scan countless online sources, easily detecting subtleties like a shift in public sentiment, minor trend changes, and the underlying potential issues.
This is made possible through machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), scanning and interpreting thousands of comments made by customers. Before these root causes become big enough to cause concern, these can be detected and responded to in record times for enhanced operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Also read: Modern media monitoring: A PR & marketing essential in the digital age
AI-Powered Crisis Detection: See It Coming from a Mile Away
AI has unlocked doors to incomprehensible levels of predictive potential. With self-learning analytical tools that keep getting sharper every second, pattern recognition and algorithmic accuracy is touching new highs with every day that passes. These tools are now being used to successfully detect crisis signs at an early stage, and reliably so.
For instance, say there’s an issue with a certain batch of products due to a malfunction at a company’s factory. This leads to poor-quality products and bad customer experiences, hence leading to significant damage to the brand. With traditional monitoring, management would take hours to detect and become exposed to this shift in customer sentiment — i.e. after the damage is already done.
With AI-based smart tech, though, this spike in negative commentary could be detected within seconds, triggering management to launch countermeasures like apology messages, offering vouchers or returns, and mitigating damage before the story spirals.
Smart Glasses and the Rise of Wearable PR Tools
Smart tech isn’t just working its magic in the field of software, but also in hardware. One revolutionary example within wearables are smart glasses. With modern AI abilities built into them, these glasses are reshaping how PR individuals can gather, break down, and come up with meaningful conclusions with raw data.
With accurate and snappy real-time transcription features, AR (augmented reality) capabilities, and human facial identification and expression recognition, these smart glasses have propelled PR reps to another level. At live events, for instance, these representatives equipped with such devices can monitor media sentiment in real-time, without even having to pull out any big devices like a laptop or tablet.
The best prescription smart glasses of today are even stylish and comfortable enough to wear every day for most people. It’s cutting-edge tech that’s in style, and it’s ideal for people who need both vision assistance as well as seamless digital capabilities.
Also read: Augmented Reality has arrived: Exploring the rich, untapped future of AR for brand CX
From Dashboards to Decision-Making: Smarter Reporting
With smart dashboards, teams can respond to crises and report on them in a more streamlined manner. Unlike PDF summaries and traditional spreadsheets of the not-so-distant past, modern tools are smarter, offering dashboards that are interactive. They pull coverage from live media and the social engagement tracking of users. With this carefully handpicked data which is of high relevance to PR strategies, teams can provide executives with real-time actionable insights that yield real results. All that, under the immense pressure of time, potential reputation losses, and the need to capitalize on rare PR opportunities.
Also read: Dashboards for media monitoring, business performance and everything in between
Smarter Crisis Playbooks with Automation
Smart tech has made countless breakthrough innovations, one of which is pioneering automation in crisis playbooks. The concept of automated crisis playbook involves systems that can have threshold limits set, and whenever said limit is crossed, it will trigger an automatic response. For instance, a spike in bad rapport on social media for a brand strikes. Automated crisis playbooks can sense this limit being breached, triggering internal alerts instantly and launching measures to undo and minimize the resulting damage.
In essence, these systems are only meant to assist rather than replace the essential human element of crisis communication. Their benefits are boosted accuracy in responses, quicker reaction times, and bringing down the cognitive load and decision fatigue on otherwise stressed PR teams.
Ethical AI and the Human Touch
With all the praises we’ve been seeing of AI-assisted smart tech lately, it’s important to acknowledge that while promising, AI still has its pitfalls — and it has a long way to go. Major AI-related concerns of today in the field of crisis communication revolve around privacy, misinformation, and bias in trained AI models.
If businesses are to adopt these new and improved smart tech tools, it’s imperative that such use be ethical, with the models being impartial and deriving their information from a diverse set of data sources. This will allow these models to make more informed decisions, which can make or break a PR strategy — especially when it comes to high-stakes decisions.
Also read: Navigating the ethics of AI in PR: Balancing automation with authenticity
Final Thoughts: Future-Proofing PR
To round things up, it’s safe to say that AI is no longer “the future”; it has already become today’s reality. For many large-scale businesses, relying on the AI-powered PR tech tools is no longer a choice but a need. From predictive analytics to automated playbooks, the landscape of innovation continues to be driven by smart tech and machine learning. Teams must act fast to adopt and accelerate their use of tools that leverage these recent advances, but any such pursuit must be made ethically and responsibility.
