Another brand, another near PR disaster, and this month witnessed one of the quickest online triggers which hit a brand as big as Amazon like a torpedo. Amazon witnessed the power of social media and online communities and with visible effects in 24 hours.
Being a rare witness to the start of a 'snowball' effect on Amazon's decision to list a book on Kindle named 'A child lover's code of conduct' by Philip Greaves, was thrilling purely because it reflected that social media is not and should not be overrated.
Amazon the internet giant also fell prey to the power of social media when it faced the tirade after its rather callous decision of not to revoke the scandalous book.
In brief, this Kindle version was listed for only $4.79 at the end of October. It hadn't received much attention until Nov 10 happened.
Without getting into the question of ethics/legality, the bigger issue was on the day-Nov10, this was spotted by a couple of influential mom bloggers, who were also parenting experts. There was an immediate sense of shock and outrage and they shared it within their communities (I witnessed this, thanks to Shara Lawrence of www.mommyperks.com, who had just spotted this and immediately went on tweeting about this. She tweeted and it got retweeted by 18 online tweepies within minutes, ref: (http://www.mommyperks.com/vip/?p=8221&sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4ce34ad2413ce2f3, 0. As the day drew close, at least 140 people had used her tweet, and this was just one person. Another mom who actively tweeted - http://twitter.com/herbadmother, ref: http://twitter.com/herbadmother/status/2389225110503424).
This quickly snowballed and within a couple of hours thousands of parents, moms and general tweepies voiced their outrage, tweets flew incessantly panning @amazon, hashtags were formed and #boycottamazon almost started trending in Philadelphia.
By the end of the day, Twitter was flooded with enraged Amazon users; many threatening to boycott usage of the site till the book is withdrawn. The listing page on the site saw a deluge of 'hate' comments and for a brief bit, Amazon held some of them off.
The company was caught in a dilemma, initially panicked and became defensive but later smartly, inevitably revoked the book. They probably realized they were surely better off doing this than alienating scores of loyal users before holiday season.
This was not the 1st occasion when a brand had to face a crisis management issue online. We had many before, many virals too like the Taco Bell and Comcast a few years ago.
This one was significant for a few reasons that merit mention:
Ø No funny cats, no laughing kids or superhot models, no bizarre videos, yet this anti Amazon tide caught on like wildfire and the effect was compelling - all-in 24 hours
Ø The word outrage! Outrage sparks strongest reactions and Nov 10 saw an unanimous sense of shock, disbelief and enragement
Ø Community power- For long considered the small fry- the mom bloggers and parents of the world combined to deliver a sucker punch. The power of online moms' was to be seen to be believed and you could see influential and socially active mom bloggers taking the initiative and their fans/friends followed
Ø Mainstream media caught on to this pretty quickly, CNN and Fox immediately ran an article with Anderson Cooper expressing his anger too and soon it became pan nation, Amazon got engulfed by boycott Amazon rants all over.
And within a week, we see John Tyner from San Diego becoming a mini celebrity himself with his tiff against TSA's norms backed by a YouTube video getting thousands of hits. Another case of a mini outrage, community support.
It also goes to prove some of these spontaneous incidents have a bigger spiral than 'sponsored' ones or brand endorsed ones.
The bottom-line is with the advent of social media, reputation management becomes all the more trickier for big brands. What would take months to cause 'bad PR' earlier, could now just take a few hours. Monitoring and Managing Reputation is imperative and the most important lesson to be learnt was - 'Do not overlook or underestimate the online voices'. They have a spiraling effect.