AmazonFAIL

Written on 4:09 PM by Sarah

As I was browsing through some of the professional marketing blogs, one word immediately caught my attention on the Church of the Customer blog: AmazonFAIL.

AmazonFAIL first emerged as a Twitter hashtag after an author blogged that Amazon was labeling books with gay/lesbian subject matter as “adult” material and removing them from search results. As expected, many people were outraged and they expressed their outrage by commenting on blogs, blogging, Twittering, writing complaint emails to Amazon, and boycotting Amazon. What was extraordinary about the AmazonFAIL phenomenon is the alarming rate that the news spread among the social networking community. Within hours, AmazonFAIL was at the top of Twitter’s trending topics, and it stayed there for at least a day and a half.

I first heard about the Amazon controversy through Twitter (not by reading a news article), and began to follow the livefeed on the topic – or tried to. It seemed like everyone on Twitter was Twittering about Amazon’s slip-up. This must be every marketing department’s worst nightmare: damaging PR that spreads like wildfire.

I wondered why one of Amazon’s representatives did not sign in to their Twitter account and acknowledge their mistake or make some kind of statement. Surely an online retailer giant like Amazon would be monitoring Twitter for any tweets about their company and would understand the value of a timely response. Apparently not. Amazon was silent on the controversy on Twitter and there is still no evidence on their Twitter page that the entire Twitter community waged digital warfare on the company for nearly 48 hours.

This thought also occurred to the authors of the Church of the Customer blog. One of the contributors, Ben McConnell, makes a good point. Referring to both the Amazon and Domino’s Pizza scandals, he says,

If these two experiences teach CMOs and agencies anything it's that your crisis communication plan should include responding within minutes on Twitter, if even to say "Yes, we're aware of the situation." That won't necessarily neutralize a bad situation, but it will demonstrate a company that's keeping up with the times. When opinions are being influenced by digital-driven word of mouth, that's worth a lot.

Amazon released a statement about a day after news of the controversy first broke, but it was too little too late. Amazon chalked it up to a “glitch” in their system, and Tweeters retaliated with the following hashtag: #glitchmyass.

A second post on the Church of the Customer blog reads:

Regardless, Amazon waited too long to address the building outrage with some kind of explanation. This is a great case study for PR professionals on dealing with today's 24/7 real-time Twitter-fueled word of mouth world.

I agree with the writers that Amazon dropped the ball here. People don’t just express outrage because they’re angry – they want to be heard. And thanks to social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the whole world hears them. At the very least, Amazon could have acknowledged the situation via Twitter so that the Twitter community would know that they were being heard. Instead, Amazon’s silence implied that the outrage was being ignored, which only added fuel to the fire.

But there is another implication behind the AmazonFAIL scandal, one that is slightly more subtle. We all know that print news is on its way out, along with snail mail. But is it possible that real-time social networking word of mouth may someday replace web articles as the first source of news? After all, many of us already use Twitter and Facebook to report on the daily news in our lives and to link to outside articles. It seems entirely plausible that if an earthquake struck halfway around the world, the news might make its way onto Twitter or Facebook long before any news crew arrives or before a journalist has the chance to write an article.

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