4 Social Media Marketing Lessons from KFC Malaysia

Last month precisely on 6th February 2012, workers of KFC Malaysia has assaulted a customer where a video was posted on Youtube recording the incident and goes viral. People have since then blaming KFC Malaysia for not respecting the customers and the incident caused a serious chaos for KFC brand name. Thanks to the power of social media, informations can spread far and wide quickly.

However, KFC Malaysia has solved the problem with the assaulted customer and issued a public apology on its behalf which wasposted at their website. Now, this crisis could be a case study about how big brand uses social media to manage their crisis effectively. So what you can learn about social media marketing lessons from KFC Malaysia?

Few days ago, while I was checking my gmail i came across a Google Adwords ad displaying right in my gmail account when I was checking my inbox messages. You can refer the screenshots below to see the ads they ran for their Adwords campaign.

I find it pretty interesting as they are using paid ads to solve their brand crisis. The ad was based on geo-targeting which means it’s only shown to users that are from Malaysia.

As for this, KFC Malaysia was targetting to display the ads to only audience who are from Malaysia. The advantage of using this, it can save your cost per click by making it relevant to only the users that you’re targetting.
When you click on the ad, it directs you to press statement on KFC Malaysia’s website where KFC Malaysia had issued an apology.

Your website is one of your intellectual property. This is because a crisis hit, your website traffic will spike as people will be searching for more information. By using your website as a main medium of communication with your audiences, you’re building your credibility to address the issue appropriately.

KFC Malaysia had also posted to its Facebook Fanpage Wall, that it is aware of the issue and are doing investigation to address the issue.

An existing corporate Facebook group may be fine for managing a crisis by posting link to your response page. Ideally, you’ll want to point any traffic for dealing directly with the crisis back to your own web site rather than have crisis response distributed all over the web.

KFC Malaysia had also showcase their settlement with the customers on offline news site.

As this issue was first went viral through online channel such as Youtube, KFC Malaysia had also integrate offline channels to address the issue. It’s important to remember you can use both online and offline channels together to reach wider target of audiences. Offline channels can be equally powerful as online media as traditional media such as TV and newspaper are perceived as the authority factor and people believe it’s authenticity.

If you find this post is useful, please do share with people in your circles.

Image: smarnad / FreeDigitalPhotos.net