RSS
Home
Mob rule and internet PR
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Here's a phrase you may not be familiar with, but are most likely familiar with the concept: Streisand Effect. If you're not familiar with how it works or the potential destructive force to your business, you need to get there.
The Streisand Effect is the almost comical boomerang reaction to a person or, more likely, an organization trying to hide, deny, obfuscate, or remove information from the public eye--particularly on the internet. It's not a new concept, per se; but, as with many things, the internet brings a whole new meaning to the concepts of Scale and Speed.
This concept was named after an event in 2003 wherein Babs--yes, that Streisand--tried to get pictures of her home removed from a public database of coastal properties (which were being catalogued to study coastal erosion), citing privacy concerns. She came to the table with a big hammer, and sued the photographer and the website for $50MM. Once the news of this flagrant display of censorship of public information hit internet sites like Slashdot, Boing Boing, and Slate, the resulting discussion drew almost half a million people to the website in a short period of time. Not only had Babs failed in her quest to suppress the pictures, she had made them exponentially more popular than they would have been otherwise.
That's the new model of markets in the Info Age: mob rule, for better or worse.
There are many, many more examples that your PR team can study and lose sleep over:
- Electronic Arts releases their much-awaited Spore game, but tries to suppress discussion on the EA forums about the intrusive Digital Rights Management software that comes with it. Within hours, Amazon's user rating system is flooded with one-star ratings and over a thousand hateful comments on how disappointing the game is, how they would never play it, and how nobody in their right mind would consider spending money on it. By the time EA responded to the issue, it was too late, and the game's rating (a game that they had spent years developing) had permanently sunk to record ratings-depths on the largest retail site in the world.
- The Church of Scientology, long known for its practice of protecting their materials and technology with layers of patents, copyrights, and secrecy, find their attempts to remove internally-produced videos of famous members, as well as CoS documents, constantly thwarted by an internet-based grassroots organization known as Anonymous, whose sole purpose is to basically make the CoS look bad. The CoS is finding that the harder they push back, the larger the wave gets, and the more public black eyes they take.
- Due to what they later called a "technical glitch", Amazon was found to be suppressing so-called Adult materials in the search results for books--mostly, it seemed, pro-homosexual literature like Annie Proulx' "Brokeback Mountain". An Amazon representative reportedly responded to a consumer's question on the topic and stated that it was their practice to suppress materials that may offend their larger audience. Needless to say, this led to a typhoon of bad press across the internet and, eventually, onto mainstream news sites like CNN. It took at least a couple of days for Amazon to respond with a simple "it's not intentional, we're working on the problem" message. The "technical glitch" now seems to be fixed.
So, what's the message here? Don't do anything that may offend The Internet?
Yeah, good luck with that. Let me know how it works out.
It essentially boils down to this: don't make any decisions in the safety of a conference room that you wouldn't want posted on the front page of Slashdot*. That does not mean that you need to kowtow to the whims of the mobs of technical people who spend a lot of time online; unless, of course, they're your market--run your business in the best way that you can, in the way you see fit to do it. But realize that if it does happen to your company, you need to be ready to deal with the repercussions, and fast. Very fast. Like minutes fast. And you need to have the right answer--one that you can back up with action.
If you talk the talk, you need to walk the walk--unless you want the next internet flashmob theme named after your company.
