While catching up on the excitement of Easter news this morning I came across this post about Amazon.
Apparently there was a ‘glitch’ in their catalogue and they accidentally removed a large number of gay/lesbian titles from search results, sparking a wildfire of speculation about their prejudice, incompetence or general ignorance.
The lack of an official response from Amazon, either by announcement or to individual emails from customers only fuelled the fire and as rumours erupted across the internet one can only imagine the clammy palmed execs panicking at Amazon HQ.Once they got this one out the damage had been done.
The Scale of Fail
This incident just underlines the importance of communication, particularly online. News spreads fast nowadays thanks to blogging and social media networks – and if you don’t tell people what’s going on there are thousands waiting in the wings to speculate on your behalf. Not usually positively.
As an agency we’ve been trying to impress this on our clients for some time to ensure they are never left in this situation – if it can happen to Amazon it can happen to you too!
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excellent post Stu and some good observations.. it can take years to build a brand and a day for a blogger to destroy it. The utilisation of ‘listening devices’ by major brands is going to be as imporant as business insurance soon!