It’s every CEO’s worst nightmare. One day you’re Malaysia’s favourite restaurant for tender, juicy chicken: The next day you’re a health hazard with consumers wincing over back-room videos of food tampering.When a video of an employee tampering with KFC’s products went viral on YouTube, it paralysed business operations, sent sales plummeting and put the KFC brand at risk. After 130,000 views, online discussion went from 'we love your chicken, KFC' to 'close KFC forever…Make it history!' As a result, sales dropped 12% (source: company data).Our strategy was to address this problem head on, through the same channels it arose from, to ensure that consumers saw this as a nasty anomaly and not a symptom of the KFC culture.

Our 6 point action plan ensured real-time, internal and external two-way communication to demonstrate ownership and transparency of the KFC management. Our messaging avoided corporate speak to connect with teens and young families online.The success of this crisis management on social steroids restored the KFC brand promise and proved so effective at re-building trust in KFC that sales more than re-bounded,: they grew to 20% higher than pre-crisis levels within a month (source: company data). Now that feels ‘so good’.

Conventional ways of handling a crisis via traditional media could amplify the negative message, frustrate consumers with no channel to vent their anger and take over 12 hours to reach our audience. We utilised social media as our primary crisis response channel: • Immediately responded via YouTube; • Demonstrated that KFC took this very seriously in a humble and sincere management response video articulating 3 operational changes to prevent a repeat occurrence;• Allowed consumers to vent in a dedicated Facebook KFC Q&A tab to reduce Fan Page clutter and speed up KFC responses; • Content distribution strategy that ensured the KFC response video appeared at the top of all searches;• Search engine marketing and ad word purchases by geography to target the issue with our response video;• Briefed employees on the situation and reinforced the company’s trust in them.

The success of our crisis management campaign saw sales return to pre-crisis levels within 3 weeks, then climb to 20% higher than pre-crisis levels within one month.Additionally:• KFC share price dropped just 1% during the crisis;• Within 4 days online-comments were reduced from 1,327 negative posts per day to less than 100 mentions per day;• Facebook Q&A topics reverted to daily operational questions within 4 days;• The top search result for KFC switched to the KFC management response video from the food tampering video within 4 days. The response video received over 260,000 views;• Sentiment towards KFC online reverted back to neutral from highly negative within 4 days; • Yahoo! News, Penn-Olsen and over a dozen websites and blogs ran stories about how effectively KFC handled the crisis on social media.