Social Media Crisis Case Studies - A Comprehensive List. Social media and the online world play an undeniable role in organizational crises and issues these days. In fact, it seems that each week brings new real-time examples of best and worst (and yes, even stupid!) Practices. This page is dedicated to pulling lessons out of those practices. Whether you’re doing research for a project or a presentation, or are simply looking to learn by example in order to strengthen your organization’s crisis management plan – you’ve come to the right place! All of the crisis case studies within this page feed from Agnes + Day’s Crisis Intelligence Blog, which means that this page is kept current with the latest scandals and crisis management lessons. This page is also organized by category, so simply choose the one that appeals to you and enjoy the read!
Choose the category of crisis case studies you’re looking for: This page was last updated on March 20, 2014 * This page gets updated often so be sure to check back! New Rules for Managing the News Media in Today's Online World | Eric Mower + Associates Reputation Management Services Microsite. An EMA White Paper based on a workshop conducted for North Carolina Chapter of Public Relations Society of America on November 20, 2008 By Peter Kapcio Caution: It’s not your father’s journalism.
In retrospect, 2008 proved to be a turning point for American news reporting. As an industry-wide financial crisis depopulated traditional media newsrooms, some less-than-savory developments in the online world occurred that together fundamentally change the way we consume news. A precipitous decline of news source credibility dictates a new set of rules for dealing with bad news and communicating during a business or organizational crisis. Nobody likes bad news. But most of all, people hate to deliver it.
Some go to remarkable lengths to avoid becoming the presenter of bad news. Dealing with bad news has never been a welcome assignment for business and organizational leaders, but the recent erosion of journalistic standards has now rewritten the rulebook. Is bad news a crisis trigger? How Brands Can Manage Facebook Comment Overload. Jason Keath is the CEO of Social Fresh, the leading social media education company for marketers. He works with industry leading brands, agencies and vendors to produce social media conferences and online social media training programs. Follow him on Twitter @jasonkeath. Human beings are social by nature, and not surprisingly, we choose to spend much of our talkative time on Facebook.
Comscore released data in December 2011 that showed Facebook is virtually synonymous with social media. Worldwide, people spend three out of every four minutes of their total social networking time on Facebook. Check out the recent comment counts on nearly any major Facebook brand Page — the numbers get big very quickly. Disney's image of Happy, the dwarf from Snow White earned over 1,600 comments at the time of publication. And these are just single posts. Thousands of Comments Per Hour Lessons Learned From Lowe's One post on Lowe's Page received 28,000 comments in just a few hours. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6 Steps for Protecting Corporate Reputation in the Social Media Age. Layla Revis is vice president of digital influence at Ogilvy PR Worldwide. Her specialties include international affairs, tourism and multicultural marketing. It takes years to build a good reputation, but seconds to damage it beyond repair, as executives at companies from Dell to Domino’s certainly have found out.
This was a sentiment echoed by executives at the Senior Corporate Communication Management Conference in New York when discussing social media and corporate reputation and how to embrace the new reality of immediate communications. When you consider the sheer volume of earned media, or word of mouth generated on the Internet each and every day, it is clear that “controlling” messaging is no longer an option for large companies, who, for many years, have been in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own reputation.
So how can a reputation bashing be avoided on the social web? Open communications and speedy response are among the pointers for corporate communicators. Netflix 1. Mexico Turns to Twitter and Facebook for Information and Survival. 3 PR-related infographics worth checking out. On a near daily basis, we share an infographic. However, on some occasions, there are so many worthwhile infographics on the Web that one just isn’t enough. So, here are three: Why do people follow brands online? People love to get deals—or at least they love to think they’re getting a deal.
That’s the driving force behind the decision by many social media users to follow a particular brand on Twitter and Facebook. For this and several other revelations about the wonders of brand following in social spaces, check out this infographic from Razorfish, Econsultancy, and Social Media Today: (via Ragan.com) The Fail Trail: Understanding the impact of a social media PR Crisis The folks at Alterian created an infographic that exposes the effect of a PR crisis on three brands: Nestle, Domino’s, and United Airlines.
Following PR crises faced by each of these brands, positive sentiment dropped sharply—as much as 36 percent in Nestle’s case. The infographic also documents these brands’ road to recovery: Study: Most companies are not prepared for a social media crisis. As emptied grocery store shelves along the East Coast proved last week, people like to prepare for impending crises. That is, unless those crises are happening on social media sites, a recent study from Altimeter Group found. "Companies are quick to deploy the latest social media technology, yet most companies are not prepared for the threat of social media crises, or the long-term impacts to business," the Altimeter report states in its executive summary.
About 76 percent of crises could be avoided or diminished, the study found. Even companies that have implemented advanced social media policies are ill equipped, because of what the report calls "fragmented technology" and a failure to tie concrete customer data to support systems and "the product roadmap. " How does a company get to that point? By following what the report's lead writer, Jeremiah Owyang, calls the "social business hierarchy of needs. " Defining a crisis Just what constitutes a crisis anyway? The findings. What Brands Can Learn From Taco Bell's Social Media Lawsuit Defense. Patrick Kerley is the senior digital strategist at Levick Strategic Communications. He is also a contributing author to Bulletproof Blog™ and can be found on Twitter @pjkerley. When it comes to high profile lawsuits, it's often been the plaintiff's use of social media that makes headlines and wins those ever-important battles in the Court of Public Opinion.
Blogs raise awareness of issues that could lead to lucrative litigation, and smart SEO and SEM campaigns can dominate the online conversation. Social media is used recruit potential class action clients. All the while, the target of the litigation — the defender — often stands mute, from a digital perspective. Commonly, the defender will cede control of the Internet’s messaging high ground to adversaries. But the “no comment” strategy has increasingly been cast aside in an age when instant impressions can cause lasting reputation damage. Use Your Peacetime Wisely Dominate Search Engines Enlist Your Fans, Followers and Friends. SpeedKills_WhitePaper_e.pdf (Objet application/pdf) P.R. Missteps Fueled Fiascos at BP, Toyota and Goldman. , celebrated for engineering cars so utterly reliable that they seemed boring, endured revelations that its most popular models sometimes accelerated for mysterious reasons. The energy giant , which once packaged itself as an environmental visionary, now confronts the future with a new identity: progenitor of the worst in American history.
And the Wall Street icon , an elite player in the white-collar-and-suspenders set, found itself derided in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Last month, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle federal securities fraud charges. “These were real reputational implosions,” says Howard Rubenstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the . “In all three cases, the companies found themselves under attack over the very traits that were central to their strong global brands and corporate identities.” Mr. Crisis Communications in Social Media: Are You Ready? Remember the Monster's Inc. move at Domino's? In the post, I quoted a character from the movie. CDA Agent says: "We can neither confirm nor deny the presence of a human child here tonight. " Do we stipulate that there are canned customers who like to receive canned messages?
In this age of personalization and "Me, Inc. "? If you're experienced in crisis communications, you know that rarely does a crisis explode overnight. There are usually two things happening during a crisis: 1.) the issue at hand that needs to be dealt with It could be a fire in one of your buildings, a disgruntled former employee who shares internal documents, embezzlement or corruption, kidnap and ransom, a hurricane takes the roof off your warehouse, your plant goes down because of flooding or a power grid failure and production is halted, etc.
Or, it could be a known issue -- one the management team or the general manager (the one with the P&L) know about and may not have briefed the communication team. ICE it 1.