Amazon Silence in the Face of Social Media Firestorm Demonstrates - again - the Need to Monitor Your Brand 24/7

By B.L. Ochman

"Amazon: the Internet company that doesn't understand the Internet" is my favorite of thousands of Tweets on the subject of Amazon's sudden censorship of gay or lesbian-themed books. The episode proved that even a well-liked household name company can pay a high price for not monitoring its brand in social media.

Over the weekend, thousands of people on Twitter, in blogs, on Facebook, and in forums angrily noted that gay- and/or lesbian-themed books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Jeanette Winterson and scores of others had been suddenly removed from Amazon listings and search results.

UPDATE: In the too little, too late department, Amazon finally responded tonight, by saying the incident is "embarrassing and ham fisted."

Amazon quickly learned a bitter lesson about the hashtags that are used to track and widen conversation on Twitter as #amazonfail became the leading trend topic on the nine million member microblogging network.

Today, Amazon called the incident a "glitch" and Gawker and others reported that a hacker nicknamed Weev claimed credit for the episode, "saying that the whole escapade was the result of his exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools." The Twitter tag #glitchmyass soon gained steam.

All weekend, as the firestorm spread, Amazon maintained silence. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels who's on Twitter, has yet to write a word about the brouhaha. Finally, today, Amazon's director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, blamed the issue on a "glitch", which was not explained.

Whether the incident is a glitch or the work of a hacker is rather beside the point. Amazon should have been monitoring its brand in social media 24/7. And clearly, it wasn't. It should have responded much sooner, and much more clearly. If they didn't know the cause, they should have said so and explained what they were doing to find out.

In this age of instant, firehose communication that we live in, no company can afford to stop paying attention to what's being said about it online.

It's a joke among bloggers and other users of social media that you can cause a lot of trouble on weekends because big companies don't monitor their brands then. Ask Motrin. Or Target, or any number of other companies who've been caught with their monitors down.

Don't let your brand be next.

Image via Gawker.

Interesting ... apparently big brands have learned nothing from the "Motrin Moms" scandal. Is it because they think they're above this kind of stuff?

You hit this spot on! Its funny how major companies don't monitor Social Media on the weekends and all hell breaks loose on Monday. Same thing happened to the Motrin Moms, guess they won't learn their lesson until it happens lol

It's a pity that big companies seem to think the whole internet closes down on a Friday at 5pm and only opens again Monday morning. I thought the whole point was its a 24/7 thing...

Social media is one great powerful tool especially in the internet. Almost all are greatly influence by it, by what it has posted or have been said. Nowadays, internet can likewise be so powerful congruent to television.

It is going to be interesting to see whether there will be any long-term damage to their brand, or whether this one will blow over.

This is a prime example of why company's need to re-discover the very purpose of marketing. I'm not a "social media marketing" believer--in my practice I consider all interaction in the market conversation as conversation marketing and social media technologies to be very powerful tools and various social media outlets/networks to be fantastic conversation locations. But regardless of how a company might view "social media" within this type of scenario, it's amazing that they don't even understand how to deal with a basic PR crisis communication issue.

In the old days (clearing throat to indicate aged-worldliness) the papers would put in a follow-up statement by a company 3 days later, but that was usually only if the paper had made an error in their story. If the business just didn't address an issue at the moment it was made public, then they were really out of luck.

Today, whether a journalist or self-publisher get's the facts about a company wrong, or the company actually screws up and should ask forgiveness, there is no excuse for not jumping in and addressing the situation a second after it happens.

More than ever before, we live in a "now-is-the-only-moment-that-exists" time. If someone else is saying your company is X, Y and Z, you better be quick to either own up to a screwup (and give details so it doesn't look like you're just trying to brush the issue away with "it's a glitch") or quick to state your companies actual position and stand behind it.

Customer service is something that too many companies have not paid attention to in recent years. Social Media and what it can create in terms of good buzz or bad buzz no longer allows them to cost cut in that arena. This Amazon situation is a prime example!

B.L. I just read your article in BusinessWeek--loved it and I completely agree with you!