In recent months, an Air China passenger plane almost crashed into a mountain, and the incident cannot help but remind people of a similar incident last year when the Shenzhen Airlines passenger plane almost crashed into the Big Buddha. In the face of a similar “public disaster”, the two airlines have chosen different ways to deal with it, and the final public reaction and impact are also very different.
Shenzhen Airlines later admitted its negligence, saying that it had tentatively designated the pilots involved and promised to review and strengthen safety training, while Air China tried to cover up the mistake on the grounds that the radio frequencies were busy, but the latter apparently ignored that in today’s era of social media, the records of control tower conversations and the flight trajectory of passenger planes are easy to be disclosed and widely disseminated.
As a result, after the Shenzhen Airlines incident, there was only one wave of disaster, and the public opinion atmosphere in both the media and the Internet almost fell in a short period of time, but after Air China’s confession of the incident, it first triggered the first wave of disasters in the media, and then caused a second wave of strong rebound on social media, which caused the company to face even heavier reputational damage.
The result is a lesson for companies: in this new era of social media, the transparency and fluidity of information are often extremely high, and even if it is a small group, as long as they have extensive information and gather public opinion, it can be powerful enough to shake the image and development of a large company.
Therefore, today’s companies must be very careful in dealing with PR and marketing, and should not try to deal with disasters in a way that obfuscates and obscures the truth, thinking that this will downplay the crisis, but in fact it will only add fuel to the fire and lead to another wave of cyber disasters. If companies can grasp this new marketing environment, it will be easier to resolve the crisis even in the face of a public disaster.
