Can bad news be good publicity?

Luke Brynley-Jones is the co-founder of Influence People, which runs social media conferences in the UK, Europe and USA. They’re hosting Social PR 2011 in London next Monday, 28^th February.

If you joined the rest of the world in cringing at the Domino’s Pizza social media PR disaster a couple of years back – Taco Bell seems to be pointing the way for large corporations in dealing with negative online buzz.

The company has come under fire for selling beef that’s only 88% beef. Now personally, I never imagine anything we eat in fast food chains is real food, but maybe I’m a cynic. In any event the company has come out fighting with a YouTube video from it’s President, plus positive posts on it’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Mashable reports that this has had negligible effects on the bad press they’re getting – but then, Mashable mentions Taco Bell’s “45k Twitter followers”, and this morning they’ve got 80k – so they look to have signed up an extra 35,000 followers in the past few weeks. Clearly, someone’s supporting them.

The key thing is – they’re making their case heard.  The very fact that Mashable has publicised their CEO’s explanation means that half the blogosphere now knows there are two sides to this story. I suspect we’ll see a mellowing of criticism as the story evens up and people realise (if they didn’t already know) that “meat” isn’t always 100% meat. And guess what? A few million more people will know about Taco Bell. In a business in which familiarity with the brand is half the battle, that’s a tidy upside to a bad hair day.

Looking back to the Toyota recall disaster in 2009/10, which many excitable people thought could be the end for the Japanese car giant, some reports showed that their active response to the problem via social media actually led to a bounce in interest from buyers.  Simply by engaging – albeit against a tide of negative sentiment – they raised the profile of their vehicles and reminded buyers of their, usually, very high standards. These people didn’t have a death wish. They were simply responding positively to the question subliminally posed by negative media press “Do you really want to buy a Toyota car?”

P.T Barnum once provided a famous insight about all publicity being good publicity – and I guess there’s no reason why social media shouldn’t form part of that adage.

Luke has kindly offered We Are Social readers a 10% discount on the Social PR 2011 ticket price, by entering the discount code “wearesocial” when buying a ticket directly from their website.