Amazon and The Power of Social Media
You guys know that I’m a customer service freak. I’ve said many times that customer service is the new marketing. So it won’t come as any surprise that one of my favorite blogs is called “Church of the Customer.”
They published a post today about the recent happenings at Amazon. If you’re not already aware, it appears that Amazon deleted the sales rankings from hundreds of gay and lesbian themed books. The customer revolt was swift which should be a lesson to all businesses about the power of social media.
Within 24 hours:
- The story became the numero uno topic on Twitter
- Had over 5,000 blog posts written about it
- A Facebook page was started and over 1,500 people have joined
- An online petition with over 9,000 signatures was generated
And the list goes on…
Folks, if this doesn’t tell you how powerful and immediate social media is…nothing will.
The Bartender has been a fan of Amazon for many years. But, I’m very disappointed that, as of today, nothing was posted on the Amazon home page or Twitter account. Even if someone at Amazon made some bonehead move…buck it up, admit your mistake and fix it. I can respect companies that admit when they’ve botched something up.
But in writing this post, there are a couple of additional learnings from this situation that I wanted to share.
When you blog or tweet or publish anything, consider the damage you could be causing. Yeah, I must admit there are plenty of times that I’ve wanted to tell the world about something I don’t like…but I would much prefer to tell you about the great stuff going on in the world.
Companies need to be consistent. If you don’t want to sell ‘adult’ content…fine, don’t sell it. But don’t unrank Ellen DeGeneres autobiography and rank Ron Jeremy’s book. Customers will not understand your logic.
In researching this article I did discover that Amazon sells dog fighting books. So until I can understand Amazon, you’ll notice that the Bartender did a little Spring Cleaning…all Amazon affiliate links have been taken down.
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