Applebee's Social Media Disaster: An Analysis

After examining the unfolding chapters of the Applebee’s PR disaster saga, I realized there were several specific points of action taken by the Applebee’s public relations team that caused this situation to go from bad to worse.  Due to the fact the entire crisis came to be because of Applebee’s firing of its employee as a result of her violation of customer privacy, Applebee’s should have been extra cautious in its customer-related postings on social media platforms in the days following the incident. If the organization had announced and explained the employee termination and then reiterated its message of caring about customer privacy, the social media outcry probably would have run its course and quieted down soon. The people posting were, for the most part, customers or potential customers, and thus would appreciate the corporate concern for their privacy in the long-run.

However, by posting a kind note written by a customer (with that customer’s clear name in view) on its Facebook page just days afterward, Applebee’s essentially kicked itself in the mouth. Posting that picture was the first key point in this crisis. The breach of customer privacy elicited another major outcry, this time with accusations of hypocrisy. This just goes to show how important consistency and continuity across corporations, and on social media specifically, truly is. Customers lose trust and faith in a brand when it contradicts itself.

Another crucial point was the first Applebee’s comment in the middle of the night on its original status update. Clearly, posting this at an inopportune time and in an essentially hidden location was bad PR from the get-go. What really sticks out to me, though, is the tone that Applebee’s used. It gave a generic (and therefore shallow) message about caring about customers and appreciating feedback before going on to highlight, with bullet points, the details of what happened at the St. Louis franchise from the time of the incident to the time of the employee termination. This stuck out as somewhat rude and insensitive to me, as a customer. Applebee’s immediately took a defensive stance. However logical its actions may seem to itself (or even the average, unbiased onlooker), a company cannot just ignore the task at hand – responding to the plethora of people online who were clearly heated about this issue. By laying out the situation in bullet point form, it felt like Applebee’s was demeaning the intelligence of its Facebook fans and simply saying something to say something, without putting any real effort or meaning behind it. We already saw the general perception by negative commenters of Applebee’s as an organization run by “corporate pigs” – and the tone and content of the initial response did nothing to change that perception, as it essentially enforced it.

The final breaking point during this crisis came after Applebee’s deleted its status update, which it had previously been incessantly posting as a comment in response to concerned customers. Deleting the update, which had thousands of comments attached, obviously did nothing to help Applebee’s case – but worse than deleting it was denying that the deletion ever occurred. If Applebee’s had deleted the update and then actually listened to the uproar about the deletion and seen the screenshots people posted in disbelief, further deciding to craft a response apologizing for its actions to delete the posting or at least explaining its reasons for deleting the post, it could have eased the concerns of many that it was a dishonest, deceptive corporation. Instead, by literally posting the words, “no posts have been deleted,” Applebee’s denied an obvious fact and refused to take responsibility for its already questionable actions. Any customers who were on the fence about Applebee’s probably fell right over to the other side at that point.

This mess has simply reiterated the importance all of the basic, crucial points that make up effective corporate public relations. It is also a lesson in ethics, transparency and trust. In the end, I feel the escalation of this crisis was the result of a combination of questionable decisions by perhaps an understaffed or under-qualified social media team and the sheer stubbornness of Applebee’s executives. The ways Applebee’s went about posting and communicating on social media was a lesson in “what not to do, ever” online, but the content and overall message was just as questionable in response to the public outcry. In this age of 24/7 communication online and the general public’s increasing distrust in corporations, it is so important to remember the fundamentals of good social media PR: be honest, think before you type, and address concerns effectively rather than spit out a generic apology or run away from them.