Applebee's Social Media Crisis

At the start of this presentation, I knew I wanted to focus on a public relations crisis involving a large company and social media. In the digital age, many companies (and people) are still trying to sort out how you handle social media, especially as a company. To many people, a company's social media page is a place to comment as they wish, without holding anything back. I wanted to take a look at a social media PR crisis, see how the company handled it and advise from there.

Originally, I didn't think Putnam's theory could be applied to a social media crisis, but when I thought "outside of the box" I saw where it could be applied perfectly. The communication is between a company and the community, however it is just on the social media scale. Once I thought more about the situation, I think Putnam's theory can be applied perfectly. Putnam believes in working with the community to create trustworthiness and uphold a reputation, and I feel the way Applebee's handled this particular situation caused the company to contradict themselves. Although they received backlash from the decision to terminate the employee, I feel they did the right thing in that sense. Their actions on social media however, are what drove them down a path of PR destruction.

I am excited to say in this presentation there were things I did not think were possible to do, however I found how to work the technology quickly, and I am amazed! Upon reading the assignment, I thought there was no way I could incorporate video and audio in a PowerPoint presentation. Alas, I looked in PowerPoint and saw the button to record audio and video. At that point, it was simple. However, getting the PowerPoint into a blog post was another hurdle, and I soon saw there was not an "upload PowerPoint presentation" on Blogger anywhere. I turned to my good friend Google and quickly find the website scribd.com, where I can sign up for a free account using my Facebook credentials. I upload my PowerPoint document and was then given an html embed code. I am very excited to learn that there are ways around any issue I may have with technology, and with a quick Google search, anything is possible!

**Update** As it turns out, the PowerPoint presentation with the embedded video and audio did not work as they should. The embedded PowerPoint post was not allowing the video to be seen. At this point, I tried many different ways to convert a PowerPoint project to a video file to be uploaded to YouTube, but none were worth it. In order to submit the project as intended, I had to borrow a Mac computer from a friend, re-film my project using iMovie, and then upload the video. What you see below is the second attempt at this digital assignment.