1. Prep Work

Creating a Crisis Search Checklist

Before you create your Crisis and Risk search in Explore, identify the potential threats facing your brand or industry. This checklist will guide you through common types of crises and prompts to use in Step 2.

2. Create a Custom Category in Explore

Crises often involve a specific brand or organization, so once you've created your brand search using the Brand Monitoring Toolkit, your next step is to create a Custom Category. A Custom Category is a saved search that you can apply as a filter to other saved searches. The video below demonstrates how to set one up using the AI Search Assistant.

Tip: You can create unlimited Custom Categories in your Meltwater account. Because of this, we recommend being proactive by creating a custom category for every potential crisis to apply to saved searches as needed.

Optional Step: Creating a New Search for an Executive Crisis

3. Apply your custom category to your brand search

Open your existing brand search and toggle on a custom category you created in Step 2.

The video below will walk you through how to apply your custom category to your existing brand search.

4. Save your new search

After toggling on your custom category, you'll see updated search results—this happens because you've essentially applied a new filter. To save these filtered results as a new search, click Save As. This way, you won’t need to toggle on the custom category every time you run the search.

The video below will walk you through saving a new search.

5. Set up Alerts

The video below will walk you through setting up alerts. We recommend adding these six alerts for crises: Spike Detection, Events (for competitors, partners, and supplies), Sentiment Shift, Every Mention Alert, Top Reach Alert, and X Influencer Alert.

6. Monitor in Real Time

The videos below will walk you through setting up Digest Reports and your Monitor tab so you don't miss a beat amid a crisis.

7. Create Crisis Dashboards and Reports

The videos below will walk you through how to create both shareable dashboards and analyze reports. Popular widgets to add to your crisis dashboard are Total Media Exposure, Media Exposure, Potential Reach, Content Stream, Sentiment, Trending Themes, and Top Sources.

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