Negative Images Via Internet Sensations

I was not familiar with the Amazon internet foul up sensation before reading this bloggers post, however I am now well informed. Church of the Customer Blog expounds upon the modern day word of mouth and viral campaign marketing that the internet has provided. They specifically talk about the negative effects that can arise as found in such situations as the Dominoe’s pizza incident and the Amazon Fail mistake.

In today’s commerce society, many business men and women have come to rely on the advantages of the internet. Word of mouth campaigns for such events as the release of the movie Cloverfield or The Dark Knight have proved to be cheap yet very effective. Consumer reach can amount to tens of thousands even before initial advertising begins due to the internets vast infrastructure. Web sites such as Youtube.com have amassed large audiences based on the participation of consumers, which serves as a haven for advertising when considering the marketing potential.

Viral and rapid word of mouth advertising can have an evil side to it however. Recently Dominoe’s Pizza and Amazon.com have come under negative fire because of internet videos and website mistakes. A marketer must remember that just because the internet has made distributing information easier it does not mean that bad information will be filtered out.

The article focuses on the Amazon incident in which the company accidentally deleted sales ranking for thousands of adult categorized books. Consumers were led to believe that the sale of this category would be halted and removed from the website. This angered many and within hours twitter accounts, Facebook groups and online blogs had begun patronizing the site giving the worlds largest online retailer negative publicity.

In my opinion, large companies should hire entire segments within their company to ensure that content such as this does not reach the masses or is spoken for in the beginning. Stopping a problem at its source is the best possible scenario when it comes to incredibly negative press, but this is not always an option because of the numerous channels found within the internet. Automatic search engines are able to pinpoint references as soon as they are posted, but these are not entirely efficient. When problems such as these arise I believe the company should take positive action in a different situation so as to lessen the amount of negativity surrounding the brand name in the short run. In times such as this one for Amazon.com there is no room for pondering multiple plans of action and weighing their positive counter effects. Therefore I believe it is important for large companies to develop broad crisis management plans for implantation. This way companies can quickly adapt situations to their pre-arranged model and release calming statements to mitigate backlash.

According to the author, companies today should adopt modern technologies and constantly be updated as to Twitter functions and Facebook trends. As long as the company demonstrates that they are up to date on recent developments such as Twitter, the author believes that a positive impact can be made. A separate author found lower on the blog mentions the importance of responding quickly to incidences online. Neither, however, write anything concerning what kind of reactions the companies of today’s age should take. The closest suggestions of how companies should handle drastic situations such as this one is that there crisis communication plans should include quick replies. I agree with their statements, but they leave the biggest part of the equation (what companies should do) out of their blog. To me it seems the blog they have created makes no sense unless they give their opinion on what the company should do. The internet, or most of the internet, has undoubtedly already heard of these catastrophes so this cannot be an informative blog unless you are stressing the statistics given as educational.

In short, this article did a good job in quantifying the rate at which modern day word of mouth campaigns can make or break a company’s image. However, after an initial comment, the blog was unable to address what a company should do in the event of a negative occurrence.