In the Internet era, when a company screws up it may face backlash by millions of people around the world.
Stephen Andriole, professor at Villanova School of Business, and his co-authors at ListenLogic, a PA social media monitoring and research company, looked at 100 of the worst cases in their upcoming book "Avoiding #FAIL: Mitigating Risk, Managing Threats and Protecting Your Business in the Age of Social Media,” which comes out in July.
We've broken out the stories and data from a few of the worst, from a backfiring McDonald's hashtag to a wildly inappropriate Papa John's receipt. Each of them offers a important lesson on how companies should react.
United Airlines gets destroyed by a dude with a guitar.
The Disaster:
United baggage handlers broke Dave Carroll's guitar. After nine months of back and forth, he was denied a refund. Caroll produced three YouTube videos about the incident, just like he told a United exec he would.
His three YouTube videos were viewed ~14.5M times in total. Over 1M tweets referencing Dave Carroll. United eventually apologized and offered a refund, but it was too late for its reputation.
Lessons Learned:
If United had resolved the issue within the first few months, Carroll could have been managed before he agreed to make the videos.
If a customer is denied, do not deny him again when he tells you he is going to create a series of videos attacking the company on YouTube (double deviation).
Unique music and videos that are supplemented by blog posts and social media become uncontrollable once they're posted online.
A Papa John's employee's racist receipt makes it online.
The Disaster:
On January 7, 2012, Minhee Cho tweeted a picture of a receipt from Papa John's that had her name listed as "lady chinky eyes," making sure to tag @PapaJohns in the post.
Unfortunately for the pizza company, her tweet got pulled onto the company twitter page. It quickly went viral, getting almost 6,000 retweets and 1,000 favorites later. Papa John's apologized publicly and via Twitter, and the employee responsible was eventually fired.
Lessons learned:
Tweeting at a brand, person often makes the post appear to a significantly higher following (in this case @PapaJohns currently has ~59,000 followers).
Apologizing on Facebook brings an entirely new group of social media users (in this case Papa Johns currently has ~2.6M likes).
Set the social media site's setting to require approval if a brand/person's username is used in a tweet -- this will require the site moderator's approval before it is posted to the official wall/feed.
Reebok promotes infidelity in a German ad.
The Disaster:
In March 2012, Reebok ran an advertisement with the infidelity-promoting slogan, "Cheat on your girlfriend, not on your workout."
The ad began circulating on Twitter and YouTube, getting upwards of 100k views. CheaterVille.com contacted Reebok complaining about 5,000+ emails received about the ad. Reebok apologized and pulled the ad from Germany, where it was launched.
Lesson learned:
Social media can turn an issue that occurred in another country into a US issue as US customers threatened to boycott Reebok over this issue.
Images of the ad first appeared on March 17th and could have been removed then, but Reebok did not respond until March 20.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider