EduMusings

Last week I wrote about the importance of researching your institution before you start any new social media initiatives to make sure when you understand the public perception of your brand and where you stand in relation to your competitors. I said that you should always know what will pop up any time a prospective student types your name into Google, Facebook or Twitter. This past week has brought to light the potentially disastrous effects of not being vigilant in monitoring your brand. Over the holiday weekend, several authors who could no longer see their Amazon sales rankings weretold by the company that their work was now classified as “adult” material and would not appear in search results that would normally retrieve those titles. The titles affected by the new “policy” seem like Victorian era censors had swept the site: DH Lawrence’s classic, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was strangely hard to find, as was the popular Augusten Burroughs’ memoir, Running with Scissors, not to mention books with more salacious titles.

The story was broken by Mark Probst, an author of one of the delisted works, on his blog, where he noted that other books and magazines dealing with heterosexual themes were still readily available. Within 24 hours the Twitters, Facebookers, bloggers,capitalists and pretty much anyone with an email address had responded. Here’s just the tip of the iceberg of the mobilization that occurred:

• #AmazonFAIL became the most used hashtag (Twitter convention to create topic groupings, ex. #sandiegofire added to all posts regarding the fire) of the day. After an Amazon spokesperson said that the censorship was due to a glitch, a new hashtag, #glitchmyass emerged.

• 5,000 blog posts.

• Facebook group, Amazonfail, which has reached almost 3,500 members to date.

The response from Amazon during these critical 24 hours? Nothing. Monday, a spokesperson for Amazon released a statement refuting the notion that the online retailer was going to go forward with any such policy and calling the situation, “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error.” Regardless of whether or not this was actually an error or a reversal on a policy they had intended to implement, the massive response coming from the public versus the lack of response coming from Amazon reinforces the need for awareness and quick responses.

In this case, Amazon should have responded immediately to the accusations that were stated in the Web’s most popular forums. Instead the Tweets, Facebook posts and blogs were allowed to spiral completely out of control before the company said anything. Initially, the delisting was thought to only affect books with tagged with gay and lesbian themes, causing a huge response from the GLBT community. Upon further research, it became apparent that the “glitch” also delisted books in categories like “health” and “mind & body,” but at that point, the genie was impossible to put back into the bottle. Calls for boycotts and petitions had already been widely circulated. Amazon should have also responded to the controversy through the same channels where it originated. Rather than waiting until Monday to respond by releasing a statement, the company should have put a statement on their website, or CEO, Jeff Bezos could have Twittered a response (although his Twitter account looks fairly dead)- news seems to travel much more efficiently over these mediums.

Amazon is currently facing a PR nightmare and I’ll be interested to see what further attempts they make, if any, to correct the current public perceptions. The best way to fix it would have been to jump into social media conversation and engage their critics in their space, immediately. I can’t help but think they didn’t catch onto the controversy until hours after it had started to spread and cause damage.