Taco Bell: Social Media Analysis

In 2011 allegation were floating around on the internet that Taco Bell’s taco meat were more fillers than meat. On January 25, 2011, the allegations turned into a crisis when a disgruntled customer filed a lawsuit against Taco Bell.

Taco Bell already had a crisis team in place and acted quickly when they got word of the lawsuit. The team held a meeting to discuss how they would handle the crisis and possible social media nightmare. The crisis team came up with a historic plan and used social media to address the crisis.

“Tacogate” as it was called, did not run from or deny the crisis that was at hand. In fact Taco Bell took out ads in a nationwide print campaign. Some of the papers they took ads out in were the New York Times, the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal and many more. The ads were five paragraphs telling the truth of what was in the taco meat. The headlines read “Thank you for suing us.” The bold ad was meant to acknowledge the lawsuit and to let Taco Bell tell its side of the story.

The video featured Taco Bell president Greg Creed. The title of the video was “ Of course we use real beef!” The video was approximately a minute and a half. The video shows that the taco meat is 88% USDA inspected beef. It also revealed what Taco Bell’s “secret” ingredients are in the other