I’m sure everyone has heard of, or seen, a social media disaster before. Whether it’s a company’s Twitter being hijacked, or a YouTube video defacing a company’s integrity, it happens all the time.
Some social media disasters I’d like to focus on are the Greenpeace Nestlé YouTube video, the Domino’s employees YouTube video, and the “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube video. I like these three examples because they were all caused by YouTube, and were all dealt with in different ways.
Greenpeace is the largest independent direct-action environmental organization in the world. (click here to visit their website http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/ ). In 2010, Greenpeace came out with a YouTube video that showed how Nestlé buys palm oil from Indonesia’s endangered rainforests, which is also putting Orangutans in danger. The video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BCA8dQfGi0) shows a man eating a Nestlé Kit Kat, however instead of the Kit Kat it is an Orangutan’s finger, a raunchy but effective way of getting the message out that Orangutans are dieing due to Nestlé. As a way of dealing with the crisis, Nestlé moved to have the video removed which angered Greenpeace, Members of Greenpeace got involved by negatively commenting on Nestlé’s Facebook page. Eventually, Nestlé agreed to use only sustainable Palm Oil by 2015. Not much better but at least they stopped angering Greenpeace members.
Now, lets look at the Dominos crisis. In 2009 two dominos employees made a disgusting video depicting two employees violating many different health codes at a Dominos. Not only was the public outraged, but also the company. Right away, Dominos had to take serious damage control (watch this video for a brief newscast on the situation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX9IgHBhf1o). The video came out on a Monday, and it took until Wednesday for Dominos to post a response video apologizing for the obscene prank video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dem6eA7-A2I). Had the response team taken action within 24 hours then their crisis remedy would have been much more successful, because despite the 48 hours it took them, Dominos handled the situation rather well.
The final media crisis I would like to focus on, and the one that was handled the most successfully, was the United Airlines YouTube video, “United Breaks Guitars”( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo) . In the video, Dave Carroll made a comedic country song detailing the way that United not only broke his guitar, but refused to pay for the damage. Instantly the video became a hit by receiving 150,000 views within the first day. With the success, United offered Carroll the money to fix it, which he had donated to charity, United took a charge with their response team, as well as changed the way their employees and customer service. Although the company did make things better with Carroll, as well as many of its customers, it is still in the minds of millions of people, as well as still on YouTube.
Social media can turn on you. Yes, it is an amazing way of promoting your company, engaging consumers, and utilizing your customer service, but everything positive has a negative. Unfortunately, social media is so powerful that a strong PR and reputation management team may not, and most likely will not, be enough to completely eliminate a company’s social media crisis.
Kassi,
ReplyDeleteGreat post. This is definitely true. As social media evolves into a major component of a company's marketing plan, it becomes and even greater component of their company risk. People today can post whatever they want about a company and have it disseminated to the entire country in a matter of seconds. Once something bad happens, the whole world may find out about it depending how vocal the person is about the issue. Many companies have recently fell victim to these instances, including your examples, and are working diligently to come up with quick, well-thought out responses that can not only save their reputations, but rebuild them. It is a scary social media phenomenon for many companies, but by becoming familiar with social media and having a strong crisis management team, companies can keep themselves from entering a pitfall. Awesome blog - looking forward to reading more in the future!
Social media is an amazing tool for brands but it can also be their worst nightmare. Social media can disseminate messages fast and to large audiences, which is great when a company has good news, but these same qualities make it detrimental to a company in crisis. People tend to spread bad news even faster than good news and social media makes it hard for a company to control what is being said about them. It is important that all companies include a social media strategy in their crisis communication plans to avoid humiliation and failure.
ReplyDeleteThe Domino's crisis is a perfect example of what your post is discussing. Also, the Nestle example was a fiasco as well, I personally did that for our Comm project. I completely agree that just like pretty much everything in the world, it's got it's positives but it also has some large negatives.
ReplyDelete