ZDNet: Two Examples of Social Failure
Taken from ZDnet’s “Social CRM: Shifting power and rapid burn” by Michael Krigsman of Asuret, Inc.
Since consumer-oriented influence groups can rapidly go viral for, or against, any organization or government, extreme reputation failure sometimes occurs with almost astonishing speed.
Wise organizations respond quickly when customers assert a leadership position over marketing messages.
On the positive side, forward-thinking companies talk back to happy and vocal customers. For example, Sonos sent me a t-shirt after I praised the company’s iPhone application on Twitter. Sure, it’s only a tweet, but Sonos listened and responded fast.
Not all companies handle the social world with such aplomb:
- United Airlines ignored pleas from an unhappy customer and ended up experiencing the butt end of a YouTube video called United Breaks Guitars. That highly critical video has received over five million page views to date.
- Amazon.com also faced large-scale social failure but, unlike United, handled the aftermath fairly well. After selling Kindle copies of George Orwell’s book, 1984, the company discovered it didn’t have proper rights from the publisher, and so remotely deleted copies from customers’ Kindle devices. The Web got angry and CEO Jeff Bezos apologized.