I read an article on AdAge this morning about Amazon’s glitch turned nasty. Which got me thinking about the effects of having 220 million critics out there…
It’s really important to dedicate yourselves to social media. Two feet in the water and swim, swim, swim!
When I’m not posting on this blog, I try to keep up with the myriad of restaurants and establishments in Chicago by posting my opinions on Yelp, a site that is the layman’s version of the Better Business Bureau. It’s great for me because it’s saved my hide a bunch of times (like when I needed to get my sewing machine fixed).
My new years resolution was to write up every restaurant or establishment in Yelp. Now that’s not bad because I thankfully pick good places to eat. But once I didn’t and we think I got food poisoning. To post that I probably maybe got poisoned by their food could potentially have harming effects. Instead, I just rated it a little lower because, in all honesty, I couldn’t pinpoint that restaurant as the reason.
But others might not judge so nicely.
So, the moral of the story: if you’re going to put yourself out there, make sure you keep an eye on what’s being posted. The easiest way I’ve found is to set up a Google or Yahoo alert for your company’s name. I do this for Slack Barshinger and, from time to time, I’ll get something that was posted in the far reaches of the interwebs. It’s good to know what’s out there. You can do the same with Twitter.
Have you had any misinterpretations? Any stories to share? Comment below!
Amazon was definitely asleep at the wheel here, however, with a brand such as Amazon’s the issue isn’t if you should pay attention, it’s what should they pay attention to. Much like a Pepsi, BMW, or another household brand, there are million’s of mentions on the web everyday and it’s not always as simple as “let’s monitor a few keywords”. In this case, they need to decipher trends, patterns, and even user sentiment to see what’s worth responding to and what isn’t. There are several tools that exist to do this in more depth, specifically Radian6, Cymfony, and Buzzmetrics. Oh and by the way, we have experience using these tools to do this kind of work
Somehow, I have a feeling Amazon won’t let this happen again.