United Airlines lost an estimated $100 million because of a customer service blunder.
Facebook's launch of the "News Feed" led to a customer protest which led to a group of student protesters creating a Facebook group of over 750,000 users in a week.
Sony lost billions of dollars in class-action suits when they decided to place copy protection (XCP) on its CDs to prevent pirating. They tried to deny and block bloggers from writing about it which led to a huge backlash among customers.
Motrin rec'd a huge backlash from moms on YouTube regarding their International Baby Wearing Week campaign.
Twitter user Astrospace deleted his/her account after flipping out on its Twitter base...the account was quickly snatched up by somebody else and the fan base was quickly lost.
The morale of the story...embrace social media, create a strategy around social media marketing efforts and show the world what your company is all about. If there are negative postings about your company, use that as a way to turn a negative into a positive.
I agree. I am not sure there is much you can do to preempt a social media negative viral event. As a large company vs an individual online out of millions, "fighting" will just make everything much worse.
ReplyDeleteHowever, when it is over, the companies need to turn it into a positive saying "wow thank you for catching that, now we can fix it and get even better than we already are" Hopefully that sparks a rebound for the company.
I agree with all of the above. Companies should try to spin the negative comments into positive changes. Companies ultimately try to get their consumers to take surveys in order to generate information on where they can improve and what should be kept the same, but consumers hate taking these surveys. Maybe companies will have to start relying on social media to find the information they need regarding positives, negatives, and areas that need improvement. This should ultimately please both companies and consumers. With that said I agree that the moral here is to embrace social media especially since we can't avoid it.
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