33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking by Juliette Powell

Author:Juliette Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business, Business Communication
Publisher: PH Professional Business

Sincerity And The Natural Order Of The Online World

Though Sarah Lacy was able to successfully leverage her increased visibility online, despite the negative nature of many comments, such is not always the case. In the online world, the old PR maxim of “all publicity is good publicity” is by no means a universal adage, as Web vendor PriceRitePhoto learned in 2005. Their saga began with the order of a Canon EOS digital camera from the Brooklyn-based retailer by blogger Thomas Hawk. In the days that followed, representatives from the company would repeatedly attempt to sell Hawk accessories for the camera and refuse to ship it until he agreed to purchase additional items. When Hawk threatened to write an article about the transaction, the company responded with abusive remarks, to which Hawk responded with a detailed blog post about his experience. Over the next three weeks, the story spread like wildfire through the online world and was covered in the New York Post, the New York Times, and Fortune magazine. PriceRitePhoto found itself flooded with e-mails, phone calls, and consumer complaints and subsequently removed from every price-aggregator and retail search engine. The online world had taken revenge swiftly and neatly, and PriceRitePhoto soon found itself out of business.

The wildfire spread of negative feedback toward PriceRitePhoto and the real-time barrage of negative Tweets experienced by Sarah Lacy expose a fundamental rule of the online world: When everything is wide open and easily accessible by the masses, you can’t run, and you certainly can’t hide. Different rules of engagement apply on the Internet, and revisionist history becomes simply impossible when information, once posted, leaves inerasable traces forever. You need only look at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a site dedicated to archiving Web sites for cultural reference, for proof of the staying power of data on the Web. Although the wide open nature of the Internet may be an unfamiliar concept to many, it is not one to be feared. When the online world goes into attack mode, its reasons are often surprisingly altruistic, as evidenced by a blog post by PriceRitePhoto victim Thomas Hawk:

Hopefully more than anything, this story will serve as a reminder to shady businesses everywhere that in the end, fraud and abusive behavior towards customers does not pay... the power of the consumer is growing. And in a new world today with tools like blogs and social networking sites... the consumer is empowered in great ways that they never have been in the past.

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