Social media impacts every part of your business. Online PR has assumed greater importance and in 2012 it is imperative that a business
- Knows who their customers are and where they are active online
- Understands the power of social media for positive and negative impact
- Makes social media a part of their risk management strategy
- Educates their employees – all employees – about the far-reaching effects a social media comment can have
- Strives to give the best possible experience to all customers
- Understands how social content gets indexed in search results and how search affects your reputation
CASE IN POINT
At 8:10 pm on Friday night Minhee Cho, a communications manager at ProPublica, ordered a pizza at the Papa Johns on Broadway in NYC.
Her pizza receipt from Papa Johns identified her as “lady chinky eyes”.
Ms. Cho is @mintymin on Twitter. On Friday she had 500 followers, and by Sunday night she had 1903. She also has a Peer Index score of 39. (It took me a few seconds find that information)
On Saturday morning Ms. Cho posted this image of the receipt via Twitpic to her Twitter account with this message:
Hey @PapaJohns just FYI my name isn’t “lady chinky eyes”.
Since it was a Saturday morning not all of her Twitter followers saw the message, but enough of them saw it to escalate the situation and by Saturday afternoon at 5:22 pm The New York Daily News published the story. By Sunday over 200,000 people had clicked the link and seen the receipt.
Today Google News has 358 results about this incident in newspapers and TV stations across the country. It’s been covered on CNN.
When you search Papa Johns in Google today, the first result is no longer their website – it is these news articles
I bet that the Papa Johns execs had a tense weekend. And I hope they know how to take care of this social and search content. Kryptonite Locks had a PR flap caused by a customer’s comment going viral in the media in 2006.
This kind of content does not go away on its own. Search Google for Kryptonite Locks today and you’ll see that negative, damaging content right there on page one.
Every brand needs to:
- map their social graph and know their customers
- train their employees on good customer service
- make sure their marketing and PR people know how to deal with an online crisis when it occurs
According to the Burson Marstellar Digital PR Crisis study very few companies are prepared for a crisis like this.
Are you ready?
