As the dust slowly settles from the Category 5 social media storm sparked by Amy Schumer’s explosive Instagram call to boycott Wendy’s last Sunday, the verdict becomes clear: Wendy’s took this one on the chin…
Forbes: “Social media can have a huge impact on brands, for good and bad. Wendy’s recently learned that truth as it received both adoration and backlash on social media. Its major flaw was only responding to the positive attention and completely ignoring growing protests.”
To say that Wendy’s PR Department had a rough go of it this past week would be an understatement. When you find yourself scrambling to cobble together a statement for CNN to defend your company from accusations of being insensitive to sexual assault in its supply chain, you know things are definitely not going as planned. And when that statement is so weak that it prompts a second wave of negative publicity, you know things have really gone off the rails.
And that pretty much captures Wendy’s week in a nutshell. We have already chronicled on this site the two stages of Wendy’s “Social Media Smackdown,” and you can find those posts
hereand
here, if you haven’t seen them already. What we wanted to do today is to provide a round-up – or, perhaps better said, a partial round-up – of the countless media stories that flowed from this particular PR debacle, highlighting those stories that best convey the social media spectacle created when Wendy’s tried to squeeze some free publicity out of a tweet by hip hop artist Chance the Rapper.
The top story in that respect was published in Forbes.com by author and business consultant Blake Morgan, author of the book “The Customer Of The Future: 10 Guiding Principles To Winning Tomorrow’s Business.” Her editorial, titled “Three Reasons Why Wendy’s Missed The Mark By Not Responding To Customers,” recounted the history of the social media spin cycle in which Wendy’s found itself trapped this past week, and concludes:
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