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Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

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The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

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Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics?
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

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Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

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We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.
Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

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The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

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Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.
Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

Sure, it’s difficult to foresee disasters that could occur in your F&B business but given the legal and financial ramifications of not having a crisis management plan in place, it would be wise to hit the ground running and start brainstorming.


Without such a plan, you could be putting your business’ reputation on the line with little means of recovery. A crisis can also strike any company anytime, anywhere. To really survive? Advanced planning will always be the key. After all, in the age of Social Media, posts and photos will go viral before you know it.


Before brainstorming, consider some of the most common mistakes in crisis management:  

These may seem like mistakes you’re unlikely to make but without proper planning, all it takes is one member of the company — from management to service line — to slip-up or get too nervous for these very mistakes to occur. So instead of putting your business reputation on the line, we’ve prepared a step-by-step guide to help you along the process. It’s time to get your crisis management plan started before any unprecedented crises hit!

Before you even start to conceptualise a crisis management plan, it’s important to understand what are some possible risks that your business faces in the F&B industry. Work with members of leadership and key stakeholders to begin listing all relevant threats and vulnerabilities that could impact the company.

Within the F&B industry, some of these risks might include food contamination, manufacturing delays, product recalls, public relations blunders, social media gaffes or even other more universal situations like cyber attacks (especially if you run an online store), data breaches and so much more.

A good to place to start is with a list of issues that have triggered negative feedback in the past and start assessing the likelihood of them occurring again.

Step 2: Have A Crisis & Strategy Team In Place

While a crisis can’t be predicted, having a crisis management strategy could reduce the negative impact on your business. Ensure protocols are set in place and various people within the company have been appointed to handle different aspects of the crisis, should one occur.

For example, a plan for a social media hiccup would involve your digital team preparing and delivering a unified statement across all social media platforms, while your customer service team is briefed on how to handle incoming calls and queries.

Meanwhile, a crisis plan for food contamination and product recalls may require help from the quality control team to investigate the source of contamination and the logistics team to determine how to fix the problem. In addition, service staff should also be aware of how to respond if a customer were to question them. After which, Customer Service, Sales, and Communications teams should work together to answer customer questions and maintain the company’s reputation.

Always ensure the spokesperson (likely to be the CEO) who will address the audience provides a consistent voice, is well trained to answer media questions and participate in interviews. Beyond that, it’s also crucial to ensure that relevant team members are informed to pause and check all ads, and halt social media postings or promotions during the crisis. In more serious situations, company websites should be blacked out as well.

Step 3: Craft A Detailed Plan For Each Situation

Depending on the possible threats, each situation would require a detailed play-by-play plan on what would happen. When crafting this plan, it helps if you answer the standard 5 Why and 1 How questions.


For instance, with regards to public relations guidelines, think about who will talk on behalf of your organisation, what they will say, when and how often they will address the public, why they would speak and where they will communicate this information. Having all of this in place would make managing a crisis far more seamless instead of having a knee-jerk reaction on what to do and who will do it when the situation unfolds.

It’s also important to have certain statements drafted and pre-approved. With the lightning speed that social media moves at, it can hurt your brand to wait for stakeholders to approve statements. Instead, putting out a statement that acknowledges you’re aware of the problem without saying too much will go a long way to putting your audience at ease. Don’t forget the longer you take to get out your initial response, the more fuel it provides your detractors.

One well-known and recent example in Singapore hails from the popular salted egg chips company, Irvin’s Salted Egg. In December 2018, the brand landed itself in an unfortunate situation and in the middle of a social media storm when a customer posted on Facebook that she found a dead lizard in her packet of chips.

While the company nonetheless apologised with a sincere and heartfelt message, supposedly by the CEO, on Facebook, it did take them about 80+ hours to respond. Some normal marketing posts even went out before the apology. Had they prepared for such a situation, pushing out the apology and taking responsibility would have been much swifter, mitigating more negative sentiments online as the hours ticked away.

Similarly, a local restaurant chain, Aloha Poke, landed itself in a hairy situation when a customer found a big spider at the bottom of her poke bowl delivery order. However, this situation was handled with a lot more grace and in a far quicker manner.

As soon as the customer’s Facebook post went up, the company published an almost immediate apology on their Facebook page to show their regret for the quality lapse and a commitment to do even better moving forward. While it’s unclear whether they were prepared for these type of situations, their speed to delivering a well-crafted response is laudable.

The co-founder also personally reached out to the customer to compensate and take full responsibility, further showcasing that the founders are personally involved in the business. Ultimately, handling a food contamination crisis with such tact and professionalism is one way to soothe any built up negativity.

Step 4: Test & Review The Plan With Everyone Involved

Just as fire drills are conducted in buildings so everyone is aware of what to do and where to go in an emergency, testing your crisis management plan is crucial.

After all, you can’t predict if your plan will work since the possibilities of where a path will take you next are essentially endless. As such, constantly test your plan to ensure you have every potential crisis and loophole covered with everyone involved. Doing this will also help you identify aspects you might have missed earlier, which you can then use to review the current plan.   

While making this plan, do not assume relevant departments or individuals are aware of their roles and responsibilities. Instead, define a clear structure and hand it down from top management onwards or from regional teams to local teams.

Once you have solidified your crisis management plan, the process doesn’t just stop there. Actively listen to conversations taking place online and in the media to understand what topics are being discussed and how they relate to your brand. Consistent monitoring could potentially allow you to pre-empt the looming crisis if you look for it.

To make monitoring easy, the Meltwater Media Monitoring tool provides an easy-to-use platform that allows you to stay on top of conversations surrounding your brand. Essentially you can track media coverage, trends, sentiment, reach, social echo and more in real-time, allowing you to manage marketing and communications activities swiftly in the digital age. For instance, if a high traction site appears on your searches, you can click through directly to the article from the platform to have a more in-depth look during a crisis.

With the Meltwater mobile app, you can also set up Crisis Notification alerts so you stay in-the-know while on the move. Begin by setting up crisis-specific searches to track crisis keywords such as ‘insect in food’. Once this keyword is identified in conversations, push notifications will be triggered, allowing you to stay abreast of potential crises anytime, anywhere.  

Using these tools, you can identify positive, neutral and negative sentiments around the crisis. This would help you to narrow down what to address and which of the numerous action plans to execute.

Crisis management may be growing more complex with the popularity of social media, as news of a crisis can spread with just one post. However, such platforms provide brands with means to act fast and accurately just by listening to the community chatter.

No doubt it’s hard to prepare for every crisis out there that could affect the F&B industry but aim to prepare for the ones you can pre-empt with these steps in mind.

Craft A Crisis Management Plan For The F&B Industry With These 5 Steps

Unexpected market forces mean that well-conceived campaigns can still rub audiences wrong, but have you noticed that some brand snafus are seemingly short-lived controversies, while others turn into crises? After reading these examples of brand blips, it bears reminding ourselves that a brand is ever-evolving in the public eye. And having an agile strategy that includes a media intelligence platform might be the easiest way to stay (or get) out of a crisis.

It might be a side effect of how many of us live online, but brand crises seem to be coming at a faster clip than ever before. Uber is a prominent example of a brand that stumbled, kept stumbling, and has yet to recover.

And while some brands have had a hard time coming up for air, others, seemingly poised for a crash, pull back in the nick of time and keep moving along as if nothing happened. By taking a closer look at how brands recovered, we might learn what makes an “almost crisis” peter off and turn into a mere blip.

Even though we believe tracking brand keywords through your media monitoring and social listening tools and keeping an eye out for early warning signs that trouble is heading your way is the best defense against full-scale crisis, it doesn’t hurt to pick up a tip or two from brands who were caught off guard.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that Wonder Woman was one of the most anticipated action films of 2017. As consumers discussed the film on social media prior to its premiere, so did brands in conference rooms. Of course, those discussions would inevitably yield cobranded promotions.

While it’s certain that a variety of snack bars were competing to have the right to sponsor a campaign around the movie, the honor went to thinkThin. Unfortunately for thinkThin, it’s their brand name that caused a disconnect with audiences’ expectation.

Everything else being equal, if the bar were named thinkHealthy, (presumably) there wouldn’t have been an almost-crisis. So what ended up happening?

Condemnation rained from mainstream media and social media for a week or so, and by the time the film was released in June 2017, there was little mention of the ill-conceived partnership. Wonder Woman went on to become a huge blockbuster and neither brand was boycott.

Why did it blow over so quickly? Because 2017 was a hard yet empowering year for women. We started the year at the biggest international march in history and finished with large clap backs with the #metoo movement. And while they didn’t call off the campaign, neither brand promoted it on social media. There was no press release and the partnership was a trip to the premiere presumably, that continued, but there was no mea culpa or press release announcement of the winner(s). Without increased promotion of the partnership, it faded from social media, as the public moved on to other pressing issues.

According to Meltwater’s Insight Reports, negative sentiment around the Wonder Woman and thinkThin® partnership’ spiked and disappeared within a week.

Timed to launch at the NYC Comic-Con, Marvel and Northrop Grumman based their partnership on an existing template: slick, branded superheroes with superpowers that embody their sponsor’s corporate values and culture. In this case, it was a new team of “Northrop Grumman Elite Nexus” superheroes fighting alongside Marvel’s popular Avengers. The goal was to highlight aerospace initiatives, STEM education, and forward-thinking technology by Northrop Grumman. Turns out Northrop Grumman’s reputation as a defense contractor rubbed comic aficionados wrong. Tellingly, one person pointed out that Tony Stark’s company produced weaponry, forcing him to turn his back on it when he realized its affects on humanity. Within 24 hours of the very vocal outcry on Twitter, the activation campaign and relationship was canceled.

Admitting that they didn’t think the partnership through, Marvel pulled out. A quick mea culpa made the almost-crisis immediately dissipate and Marvel went on to enjoy their lauded position at the NYCC.

Bedrock Detroit launched a campaign whose aim was to empower their namesake city. The tagline was “See Detroit Like We Do” and included images of urban professionals enjoying a downtown life of dining out, entertainment, and work. The thing is, in planning the shoot and booking models, the campaign forgot an essential aspect of Detroit, its diversity.

Considering the levels of planning and approval these images must have gone through before being placed on posters around the metro-area, it’s a wonder that someone didn’t say, “Hey, if we’re using this tagline, should we make sure it includes different aspects of the population, whether that is skin color, age, family structure, or other socioeconomic factors?”

Dan Gilbert apologizes for controversial graphic on Detroit building

Once the outrage popped up, Bedrock Detroit founder, Dan Gilbert, personally issued an apology and the ad campaign was pulled. Even as the mainstream media covered the issue’s eruption on social media, the general public moved on to other matters. The question that remains is, will Bedrock be more conscientious going forward? Will they show Detroit as “a city that is open, diverse, inclusive?” Hopefully using the data that their community and audience is sharing with them about their campaigns will guide their future campaigns.

According to Meltwater’s Insight Reports, the Bedrock campaign caused tonality (sentiment) to dip negatively for the Detroit realtor, but within two weeks the brand was back in the green.

Using a media monitoring and social listening platform likely assisted these brands in quickly responding to their communities. Considering how quickly decisions were made, it looks like Marvel and Bedrock Detroit had crisis plans in place. Springing into action to stem the blood flow with succinct apologies and pulling the campaigns in question requires both an agile and prepared PR team. And while those responsible for the thinkThin partnership can’t necessarily apologize for their approach (since it’s the product’s name that caused the public to react), their ability to keep their cool and step away from the ledge also indicates that a crisis plan was likely already in place. Their decision to not promote (if not quite cancel) their #thinkWonderWoman campaign resulted in social media moving on by June 8, less than a week after the film’s premiere. Every one of these brands was spared a protracted crisis by their quick thinking and prepared comms team.

To make sure you have signposts in place before your brand is mentioned in social media, download our e-book on crisis comms. Being prepared for a crisis well before you’ll need it is the easiest way to recover quickly.

Reputation Management

Craft A Crisis Management Plan For The F&B Industry With These 5 Steps

Crisis Management: How 3 Brands Recovered Right Away

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