I had an interesting discussion with a client about my KFC post. The question that they asked was that if I had been working on reputation management with KFC, what would I have had them do differently?
It was a great question which eventually led to this post. When an event like rats in a restaurant happens, no amount of PR or reputation management will make the story go away. The situation happened, and what you are trying to do is mitigate the impact of negative press that you are receiving. In the KFC case, as a result of their inactivity, search engine result pages and social media sites like Technorati and YouTube are full of KFC and rats stories. These postings and files will live infamously online for years, impacting the public perception of KFC for years.
So what should they have done differently? My goal would have been to get “KFC friendly” listings in the search engine results pages as well as in the blogosphere. Since I need to actively combat all the negative news about KFC I need a syndication method to distribute my content. This I need a blog site with RSS. Many major companies have hundreds of domains that they own and are sitting around. We would role out one of these domains (something like www.kfcfightsback.com) and distribute all press releases from this site.
Now some of you SEO’s are asking, what about the Google Sandbox for new domains? This web site will be KFC response to the world. It will generate links, traffic and buzz practically overnight. As a result it will not enter the sandbox. This tactic was very successful with Katrina and the Tsunami in Asia, where brand new web sites appeared overnight in Google.
Now that we have this new web site, KFC should have issued a series of press releases (all using this domain). The press releases should inform the public that we KFC is aware of the situation and it working the Health Department to understand what happened, and what they are doing about it. The original press release saying this was a local issue should never have occurred. By issuing a series of press releases we are getting the KFC version of the story out into the media and onto the Internet.
The second step was making the KFC press team available to the major newspapers and high authority bloggers for interviews and comments. My goal here is to generate some positive articles about the situation. By not doing anything, KFC was conceding that the top thirty listings in Google would all be negative. One of the goals of any reputation management strategy is to capture back some listings with positive articles and stories.
By adding multiple press releases and making the PR team available to authoritative Bloggers and media personnel, my goal is to recapture 10 of the top 30 spots back. That means that 1/3 of the top 30 Google results now contain positive “rat” stories instead of negative ones. Also, by having positive stories intermeshed with negative stories, I am also lowering the impact of the negative articles.
The next step is the most critical and that is to convince consumers that it is safe to come back into a KFC store. Rats and restaurants don’t mix, which make this a much harder reputation issue than the one that JetBlue has. So KFC needs to generate buzz and regain customer confidence. One way to do that would be to have a special KFC day where everything in the restaurant is 50% off. You create buzz and hoopla around March 14 (random date) to get people into the store. You run contests online, and give away coupons on the site redeemable for free drinks etc. The concept here is to create a third wave (press releases and interviews being the first two waves) of articles and postings about KFC that will work themselves into the search engine results pages and blogosphere. A major campaign could be expected to capture another 8-10 of these Google spots.
By mid-March I would expect that about 2/3rds of the “KFC + Rats” results on Google contain neutral or positive stories instead of containing purely negative stories. As a result, the ten negative stories are surrounded by more positive stories, further negating their impact.
This is what I would have told KFC. What would you have told them?
{ 0 comments… add one now }