December 1, 2005, 2.54pm • 3 comments » • 785 Views

The social web is an anti-PR tool extraordinaire

First we had marketing via Flickr. Now say hello to anti-PR, social web style.

I’m a big admirer of Thomas Hawk’s photos (not to mention his blog and podcast) on the popular picture sharing community. But screw Hawk over and he won’t think twice about launching an all-out anti-PR assault against you.

When Thomas ordered a $3,000 camera from Brooklyn-based PriceRitePhoto, he was met with a phone call forcing him to buy unwanted accessories. After declining, he got another call to say the camera was not available. Thomas said he was going to rat on this poor practice by writing an online article, but was met on Tuesday with a barrage of abuse and legal threats.

How did this play out… ?

• Thomas posted a full account of the episode to his blog, a post that quoted the store manager and republished negative company reviews from around the web. The post has since received over 290 comments and, you can bet, a whole lot more page views.
• He posted the same account, with photos, to Flickr. It has been viewed over 4,000 times.
• This being the social web, Thomas’ own posts were only the start…
  • After his post was added to the social bookmarking site del.icio.us on Tuesday, it was picked up by over 70 other people and rose to the top of del.icio.us‘ much-watched popular list.
  • Thomas himself posted the story to Digg, the social newsmarking tool I wrote about this month. Digg readers were outraged; they “dugg” the submission nearly 6,000 times to make it not just the site’s top story of the day but its number one story of the year. Cue an even larger proliferation of attention.
  • The story was picked up by Slashdot, BoingBoing and MetaFilter - only the web’s other most-popular blog/news digests. It’s also risen up to New York gossip blog Gothamist and gadget-lust destination Gizmodo.
• Contributors adding comments to both posts offered several new case studies into their dealings with the company that enlightened both Thomas and his readers. Sympathisers flooded the company’s phone line with complaints on his behalf. One complaint from a Digg user resulted in the company being delisted from the Pricegrabber service and, later, from Yahoo! Shopping.

There’s only so long a web meme can generate this kind of buzz without breaking through into the “mainstream” media (if there is any such thing anymore). Expect Thomas’ case to be covered by them soon.

Clearly, the message here is that retailers can no longer expect to (allegedly) mistreat customers and get away with it anymore.

It’s not just that victims can blog their experience. In the emerging ecology of social content proliferation - in which messages gain a high-definition audience of very interested participants extremely quickly - the mere mention of wrongdoing will attract an army of pro-consumer co-conspirators, eager to help, who will never be a customer to such a company again. Call it benevolent Big Brother, the consumer champion.

I have endured similar, albeit on a much smaller scale. This time last year, the aluminium surface of my Apple Powerbook began to corrode. This was only months after purchase and it is a known problem the Powerbook suffers from, even though Apple claims it is merely a cosmetic issue. I posted photographic evidence to Flickr and took advice from people there.

I was recently stiffed again by a small computer repair store that deliberately sent my machine for destruction without permission whilst it was in for assessment. In fact, one wonders if that’s really what happened to the machine. Were this incident not scheduled to come before a small claims court next year, I would have taken the Thomas Hawk approach to anti-marketing months ago.