When is it time to hire a PR Firm? Napleton Infiniti

[Jeff Kershner]

I'm sure by now most of you have seen or read what is going on with Napleton Infiniti - https://www.facebook.com/INFINITITALLY/ Be sure to check out their position and "apology" and the 100's of comments.

If you're not familiar, Napleton Infiniti I guess decided it would be a good idea to use parking at FSU to store their vehicles during the Hurricane. The backlash from the community has been quite stern.

Let's be fair, most dealerships do not have a team of PR specialist on staff to help handle situations like this - right or wrong. So my question is, when should a dealership know when to NOT take on the public and hire a PR firm to help represent them?

 

[derrickwoolfson]

@Jeff - given the 'public' arena on this is across the US they should have hired a PR team prior to making any official statements, posts, or public apologies. That said, their biggest mistake was making a comment (which was later deleted) stating please do not leave bad reviews. It really hurts business. We were unaware that we did not have permission. We have donated money.
That - clearly - did not go over too well, which caused them to quickly *delete* 400+ bad reviews. After deleting the reviews, the public then took to old posts calling them out for deleting the posts.
At this point, the damage is just escalating and they need a PR team ASAP. The PR team needs to create a live feed video apologizing for the severity of their actions. This needs to come from the owner or DP. Once they've apologized - they need to come up with a *serious* good will campaign to reinstate their image. If they think that this will go away, boy they are wrong. Every time someone searches their name the "negative reviews, articles, and posts" will come up first.
What's worse, too is that evidently as of yesterday there were still units in their garage! It is time to grab the popcorn, and watch this one out.

 

[Steve Stauning]

Turn off the social media pages and wait this one out. It will blow over in a week if they stop posting about it.

Make your statements in the local news (where it matters) not on social media (where trolls worldwide are just waiting for something meaningless to outrage them for the next 20 minutes).

Oh, and hire a PR firm yesterday...

 

[Alexander Lau]

Ouch...