It will probably cost a lot of effort and money to Volkswagen
to regain its position as leading and reliable top class automaker in the world
markets. The diesel emissions manipulation scandal will probably forever be a
dark page in the company’s history. But amid the doom and gloom, the
resignations of top executives, the lawsuits, the recalls of millions of cars and
the congress hearings Volkswagen has brilliantly managed to avoid a social
media disaster: A “shitstorm” as they call in Germany a social media customer
or public attack. Such public attacks have been quite common the last years and
companies like P&G, Nike, Primarkt, McDonnalds, Uniter Ailines, Gap, IKEA, Nestle’,
Cryptonite and many others have experienced firsthand how powerful the new
consumer is, armed with the social media. All these companies were attacked by
blog swarms or negative posts in social media for all kinds of reasons.
While bad publicity is nothing new in the world, businesses in
the past could contain reputation problems using PR in combination with mass publicity
in various media channels under their control. But with social media customer
attacks things are different, not only because of the fast dispersion of such
attacks, sometimes in global scale and the ferocity of such attacks but because
of the fact that containment is notoriously difficult.
While in the past companies have suffered serious reputation
damage trying to deal with social media attacks the old fashion way, things
seem to rapidly change. Social media
customer attacks have forced many businesses to develop contingency plans for
online reputation damage and professionalize their community management
methods. Reputation or Community Manager, a management function that did not
even exist five years ago is today a common place in most large and medium size
businesses. Volkswagen must have very good social media damage control plans or
reputation managers if we look to the facts: The business disaster of emission
level manipulation di not become a social media disaster, something very
obvious if we look to the picture above illustrating the volume and the
sentiment of the social media posts around the case (data based on COOSTO data
monitoring). A sharp increase in posts and high negative sentiment in social
media posts from the date the scandal was revealed (around 21 of September) followed
by a sharp decrease after the US Volkwagen boss Michael Hom offered his public
apologies without any efforts to hide or undermine the case and even admitting
that Volkswagen “totally screwed up” while the VW chief executive Martin Winterkorn issued an apology
saying he was "endlessly sorry" for the "manipulation". (http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34322668
). With such statements VW removed all ammunition from customers who
would take their frustrations to online comments that would probably have a
snowball effect in the social space, causing a difficult to reverse reputation damage.
Transparency and honest apologies help therefore more than old fashion
professional publicity and denial of wrongdoing, something many of the earlier
mentioned victims of customer attacks did.
