Social media crisis communications is an area of concern for any company, and needs to be a part of any enterprise social media strategy. Representatives of top brands shared best practices for social media crisis communications at BlogWorld LA, in the Calm Among the Chaos: Maintaining Brand Reputation During a Digital Crisis panel.

Panelists were Bridget Jewell from Mall of America, Jason Miller from P.F. Chang’s China Bistro and Justin Levy from Citrix Online, moderated by Tony Saucier from Olson. (Bridget, Justin and Jason are pictured.)

Here are 16 key takeaways from the conversation that can help guide your own social media crisis communications plan. (You can find more practical advice in the Radian6 Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Playbook.)

1. Admit fault, attack it head on and try to turn a negative into a positive as quickly as possible. Empower your teams to deal with customer issues quickly and bring them to resolution.

2. Build your community before you need it. If you have a community who trusts you already they will come to your aid if people make negative comments.

3. Incorporate face-to-face. If a customer makes a complaint or raises an issue and is still at the mall, Bridget will attempt to meet with them to assess and assist.

4. Include trained customer service representatives in your social media team. The Citrix Online team includes a customer service rep who understands the brand, the products and common support issues and knows how to respond, triage and escalate.

5. Know how and when to take the customer’s issue offline. For instance, don’t play out a long exchange on your Facebook page if you can move the discussion to email, the phone or private message. Your community will see that you responded and offered assistance, without watching the gory details.

6. Learn as much as you can about the customer when you reach out to respond. If you have information in your database about them, the products they use and their history, it will give you context that will frame the issue and your response. Integration between your social media monitoring and your customer relationship management (CRM) tool can make this easier.

7. Don’t be afraid to say, “I’m sorry.” It goes a long way, even if the issue is out of your control. If the customer is facing a difficult problem, they will appreciate your empathy even if the problem was not your fault.

8. Know who all the players are in your company who will be involved in a crisis. Make sure they know who you are and what you do so they will value your participation in a crisis.

9. Your messaging needs to be consistent across all channels, online and off. Bridget makes sure that everyone at Mall of America involved in communications, from the social media team to the call center to the security personnel, shares a consistent message in a crisis.

10. If you’re on the social media team, share positive feedback from your communities with your internal audiences, not just negative feedback. Show them the good that comes out of your social media interactions, not just the bad.

11. It’s okay to say that you don’t know the answer, or to refer customers to the right person in your organization.

12. Have a plan. Be proactive rather than reactive. Justin helped develop a communications plan around an acquisition Citrix made to ensure they knew how they would respond in a wide variety of possible situations. Make sure your plan includes specifics of how, when, where and who would communicate around potential issues. (Again, check out the Radian6 Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Playbook for examples.)

13. Keep your plan up-to-date. Every time you have a crisis situation, there will be new lessons learned.

14. Have a social media policy that maintains consistency of voice and message across your outlets. Jason pointed out this is especially important for a chain like P.F. Chang’s, or a company with multiple brands and multiple locations.

15. Listen to what your customers are saying. Use a social media monitoring platform to aggregate their comments. Use that data to improve your products, your operations and your customer service.

16. Make sure you have a social media monitoring and listening platform in place before a crisis or major event (good or bad) to ensure you can monitor and filter any comments in a crisis.

Have you integrated social media into your crisis communications? Do you have a plan in place?

David B. Thomas is Director of Community and Social Strategy at Radian6. He’s also a dad, a home cook, a music nerd and tech geek, and co-author of The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy: How Social Networks Are Radically Transforming Your Business. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbthomas.