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February 23, 2007
Rats at Taco Bell & KFC
It's a headline that's bound to create gray hairs for the brand managers of a national restaurant company, but that's the difficult problem today for Yum Brands.
A New York TV station filed a live report this morning showing rodents scurrying through a combination Taco Bell/KFC. Buzz has spread quickly.
If this story hits Digg or the video gets uploaded to YouTube, then things get ugly even faster. By then, it ceases to be a local story and an "isolated incident." It can, like the JetBlue trapped-passenger story from Valentine's Day, become a national referendum on laws meant to protect the public.
A rapid-response web effort has never been more important to crisis communications. That won't work when home pages of web sites are designed as Flash-driven promotional tools, not information centers. The KFC and Taco Bell web sites are purely centers of promotion, so they do not help Yum manage or influence word of mouth at all.
All they do is let traditional media and social media own and manage this story.
Update: Kate has an update on the story at AdAge.
Update 2: Yum Brands has closed a number of restaurants run by the franchisee in question. When I originally posted this, none of the video footage had yet made it to YouTube.
As I update this post six days later, there are at least 27 videos on YouTube with approximately 660,000 cumulative views. On the TacoBell website, under the "latest news" tab (the site's Flash-based navigation prevents direct-linking) Yum Brands president Emil Brolick apologizes to customers and says, "Frankly, we're embarrassed."
Good use of video. Yum should also post the video to YouTube, where the rats are still running a bit wild.
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Our friends at Church of Customer have spread the news about live rats in the kitchen at the Yum brand's Taco Bell/KFC outlet in NYC. As they point out in their post, once this news spreads to Youtube and beyond, Yum will be in crisis mode. As we have ... [Read More]
