It’s interesting that I might start off this blog with such an interesting event as the one that traspired at Amazon.com this past weekend. For those of you that might not have heard of this event or just are not sure what happened–here is the quick low-down.
Sometime this past weekend online shopping giant Amazon.com managed to remove an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes from their normal rankings within the site. This, ‘un-ranking’ within the system caused these titles to effectively fall off the face of the earth and stir-up a hornets nest of controversy as to the reason that this group of topics suddenly disappeared overnight. It turns out that a mistake was made in Amazon’s categorization system that flipped these titles to be flagged as adult in nature.
Whoops! I’m sure this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but it’s one of the first to feel the full power of the twitter hash tag. The hash tag #amazonfail quickly spread through twitter, and while on it’s own this is nothing new, this hash tag spread more than news…it spread lies. It turns out that this massive tweet effort was spreading the word that Amazon.com was bigoted toward the gay movement and even helped spawned efforts to boycott the online retailer.
While this is supposed to be about social impact, what about Amazon’s response? To date, I have still not hear an PR release or statements make admitting anything other than the fact that mistakes were made that they have been corrected. No appologizes, no sympathy, and certainly no admission of guilt. I really have to question the way that Amazon has handled this whole situation. In this day and age swift and cincere action is required by every company due to the instant knowlege sharing capabilities of Twitter and Facebook–and this goes double for online businesses. If you want to see a truly forward thinking company handle their mistakes, look no farther than Netflix who early last year suffered through delivery problems to 2.8 million of it’s own subscribers. What did Netflix do:
“We apologize, and we’ll be automatically issuing credits to all of you whose shipments have been delayed. Our goal is to ship DVDs as soon as possible and to provide a personalized e-mail update to you if your DVD shipment was delayed.”
Quick and decisive action was taken to ensure that their customer base was secure in the fact that Netflix had their best interests in mind.
Well, now it’s late and I’m just tired but this is nothing new and I think we all knew that at some point Twitter was going to help spread something that did more harm than good, but maybe this is the wake-up call. That bit of information that makes up all stop and consider, “what am I really forwarding on to my followers”.
