Carrefour China is in a huge trouble now

I put a post ‘political issues and other disasters’ previously, talking about the boycott issues happening in both real life and virtual world in China now.

I mentioned Carrefour China is boycotting by Chinese netizens. Now the crisis is getting worse. Several most famous Chinese searching engines, which including Google China and Yahoo China are boycotting Carrefour China now, by blocking all the web pages, news, even pictures and blogs regarding the term ‘Carrefour’ in Chinese. That is to say, if you want to search ‘家乐福’, you only can see are these:

"The following information might against the policies, are currently unavailable".

These are all top serching engines in China. Till now, none of them has made any comments on that.

Fatigue? What about this new feature?

Siggy posted ‘early signs of Facebok fatigue’, arguing whether social networking fad is going down. Three days later, this most popular social network site announced that IM (Instant Message) is now available to all Facebook members. It now begins to compete with the similar services offered by Yahoo message, MSN and Google Talk.

Now all Facebook users can see a chat bar at the bottom right corner of their page when they log on.

"Some distinct features of Facebook's integrated IM service include notification through sound and provision to view the Mini-Feed (updates) of a friend's profile page while chatting with them in real time. Moreover, the chat history isn't logged permanently."

Will this new launched service boost the number of new registration or hold all old users? Let’s wait and see.

“Hands on with Facebook Chat—timewasters only”

RSS — a win-win technical tool for journalists and public relations practitioners

Siggy in his presentation and post talked about the RSS feed and its application in virtual world. Derek pointed out the profound influence on monitoring various discussions on the products and the organisation.

Since journalists all place higher expectations on speed of the information delivery and exchange, RSS feed exactly could meet their needs, especially the moment they are following an ongoing crisis in an organisation. We all understand the important role an online press room plays in crisis communication. But imagine if practitioners had online press room updated while journalists missed the message that practitioners trying to distribute.

In this way, neither of them had the benefits of online press room. Therefore, except understanding the benefits of RSS feeds by ourselves, we also should make effort to encourage journalists to subscribe RSS feeds to keep up-to-minute with every content change in organisational online press room.

Challenging Anonymous editing in WIKI

Using WIKI as an internal communication tool, which is a very innovative idea. (We have talked about this topic in class. Giota also posted an article in her blog). We argued that WIKI, to some extent, could be used as a substitute for traditional group discussion within an organisation, especially when group members have difficulties to gather together by geographical restrictions. Gioda mentioned many alternative ways using WIKI, such as resources, event news, collaborative discussion (Q&A), tracking coverage, schedule, tasks, meeting notes, project status, research results, contacts, team lists, and member profiles.

Here, I want to talk about WIKI with from an alternative perspective. WIKI in its website lists five foundation issues that are considered to be beyond debate. "Neutral point of view as the guiding editorial principle" is on top of the list.

"The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree. Of course, 100% agreement is not possible; there are ideologues in the world who will not concede to any presentation other than a forceful statement of their own point of view. We can only seek a type of writing that is agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points."

However, the real world isn't that simple and perfect. A young man in the states therefore set up a website called WikiScanner when he heard about Congressmen getting caught for white-wahsing their WIKI pages.

"WikiScanner combines two databases: (1) The list of all IP adresses that have made edits to Wikipedia, and (2) What IP addresses belong to which companies. So with WikiScanner you can type a company name, and it shows you what edits have come from IP addresses owned by that company."

The founder of this site concluded three common kinds of vandalism when people using WIKI nonymouslly:

1. Wholesale removal of entire paragraphs of critical information. (common for both political figures and corporations)
   
2. White-washing -- replacing negative/neutral adjectives with positive adjectives that mean something similar. (common for political figures)
   
3. Adding negative information to a competitor's page. (common for corporations)

So next time if some public relations people are required or even forced to make some unethical change some information on Wiki for your company’s or clients,just remember, you will be traced and be exposed to the public.

Political Issues and other disasters

There are two new-borned websites are very popular among netizens in China. Interestingly, these two non-profit websites are both set up by average Chinese netizens to demonstrate their opinions towards the protest recently happened in Tibet and other related incidents.

One websites is http://www.anti-cnn.com/, which "is established to expose the lies and distortions" the American news network (and other western media organisations). But CNN is becoming the target since one of its archor Jack Cafferty appeared on The Situation Room, and called Chinese "goons and thugs" and said products manufactured in China are "junk". Another websites is aimed to raise a campaign to boycott Carrefour, the French retail giant, whose biggest shareholder— LVMH Group is accused to donate a huge amount of money to Dalai Lama.

The website http://www.anti-jialefu.cn/ has been created to demonstrate the boycott Carrefour, the second biggest retailor based in France. Emails, text messages are spreading among people in China, saying not go to Carrefour on 1 May and suggesting not purchase products under LVMH Group such as Christine Dior, Louis Vuitton, etc.

Public relations people in Carrefour China responded quickly when asking organisational attitude towards the f Li Jing, head of public relations for Carrefour’s Shanghai branch, said the company was investigating the situation. Yesterday, a statement released by Eric Legros, the CEO of Carrefour China appeased on media outlets online and almost all the popular websites in China.

The statement stresses the goal of Carrefour is to promote economical and cultural development across the world. Carrefour has and will never do any things which might hurt Chinese people. The statement denies "the support to certain illegal non-government organisation(s)". At the end of the statement, Eric mentioned he and the CEO of Carrefour Group are fully support of Beijing Olympic Games 2008 and are expecting to attend the opening ceremony in Beijing.

From a public relations perspective, the reaction from Carrefour is fast and effective. Public relations practitioners in Carrefour were aware of the problem and the different voices from the virtual world. They responded to the rumour very quickly.

There is a growing tendency towards utilising ICT (Information & Communion Technology), such as websites, mobile phones, PDA as a tool in crisis communication. In my opinion, public relations people with Carrefour China could do a little bit more, such as setting up "online media centre" to better satisfy journalists. Gernerally speaking, the section incorporates important contact numbers, all the news releases, CSR report (corporate social responsibility), images and videos together. These could be used as supplementary information to support Carrefour’s statement and stand.

BA Terminal 5 chaos, so does BA PR?

A high-tech, hassle free travel experience in Heathrow Terminal 5 turned out to be a nightmare to all the passengers.





Telegraph has already listed the chaos in the list of top PR blunders.



"It was a PR disaster', Telegraph comments, "the airline and airport appeared to be blaming each other for the emerging chaos".


And "according to BA insiders, the airline's press officers working out of the company's Waterside headquarters were not trying to spin their way out of bad news".


"The sad truth is they had as little idea of what was going on at Terminal 5 about a mile away as the passengers who were engulfed in the shambles itself."



Finally, BA's CEO, Willie Walsh appeared on TV to apologize the current mass, who performed far better than his colleague Gareth Kirkwood, the airline's director of operations, who was described as "the original rabbit dazzled by the headlights".


"He read a statement and then scuttled off at some speed, accompanied by his minder, refusing to take any questions".


In this case, BA's website and its online press centre within in play an important role. The link of updated information is on the home page. Passengers are advised to check latest arrivals and departures information before they travel to the airport.


Speaking of its online press centre, however, news are not updated on daily basis. Specific tactics dedicated to the crisis are not well stated to journalist. Therefore, they could not blame journalists for using their own angles to tell stories.