Amazon loses its fORM

Online Reputation Management requires one to be in constant communication with the people who are in contact with your brand. It’s not rocket science, right? We all know the increasingly influential power of bloggers and the negative effects they can have (remember “Dell Hell” ?) and the effects of YouTube videos (Domino’s pizza spring to mind?).

There has been much controversy surrounding the apparent “error” that Amazon.com says caused the removal of sales ranking and search algorithms for hundreds of gay and lesbian books.

Big mistake my Amazonian friends. BIG mistake.

So, it baffles me, that with this saga revolving around Amazon’s latest “glitch”, that such a large company (that operates online!) would let this “golden rule” slip. Gene Grabowski, chairman of the crisis and litigation practice at Levick Strategic Communications in Washington told the New York  Times: “Frankly, it’s quite surprising to hear that Amazon, which was a pioneer in the digital space, would miss this opportunity to react in real time and to manage the crisis better than they did”.

The way I see it, the problem arises in the way that Amazon dealt with this major “internal glitch”. As one can imagine, the authors whose books lost their rankings were highly put out. The people searching for books were confused, disappointed and they almost definitely offended the gay and lesbian community as well. Now, that’s a LOT of emotion to have to deal with, and Amazon should have taken an educated and careful approach before diving headfirst into the mess that had been created.

When all the hype seemed to be gaining momentum the company released their official statement on the situation, saying that they acknowledge the “ham-fisted cataloging error,” that they had fixed many books and “intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.”

Unfortunately, given the free sharing power of the net, many different stories started floating around cyber space. There were several different explanations that came from Amazon employees “who claimed the issue was caused by everything from the now notorious ‘glitch’ to human coding error to, disturbingly enough, an ‘experiment’ being done by the company.”

The above illustrates how stories can escalate if not dealt with correctly. Amazon needed to demonstrate company transparency  and have one united “corporate voice”. However, given their lack of unity and the various accounts of the source of the problem, it was left it up to Tweeters and Bloggers (most of whom were incensed by the whole situation), to come up with their own theories. Is Amazon homophobic? Was it a hacker that intentionally made the switch in phrases? Was this a company experiment that went terribly wrong? Was it an inside job? Which Amazon employee should we believe? Nobody knows.

• Amazon should have dealt directly with the “technology that was tearing it apart”. Ah yes, you guessed it-Twitter. As an online company, they should be in the loop with Social Media and the effects of instant sharing of information, but, alas, they instead gave the public the delayed corporate, “ham-fisted” explanation. If they had been aware and responsive to the Twitter eruption, they may have been able to prevent the term “Amazon fail” from surpassing the words “Easter” or “Jesus” on Easter Sunday afternoon.

• They should have dealt with (or at least tried to pick up) mentions and respond to angry bloggers, or even for that matter, to communicate with those bloggers that may have been misinformed (as this was where most of the theories arose). They didn’t get a solid explanation, so they made up their own and thus jeopardized Amazon’s credibility online.

• They should not have hesitated. In an online world where things happen very quickly and the channels of communication are changing rapidly, hesitation should not be allowed in company policy. People needed to be assured that the company that they do credit card transactions and share personal information with, was in control of the situation.

• Amazon needed to be “forthcoming and accessible”. The customer service representatives at Amazon were open to phone calls and emails. But the fact that they made no effort to provide in-depth information (which is what the public wanted) made it seem that Amazon was hiding some skeletons in their cataloguing closet.

Unfortunately for Amazon, this failure to keep on top of their Online Reputation Management has caused many customers to lose faith and trust in them. This will inevitably take a great deal of time to recover from. We can learn a valuable lesson from them; when the negative mentions online outweigh the positive ones it is an URGENT situation that requires IMMEDIATE action. As Warren Buffet says “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”