This is a couple of years old, but worth sharing: Vincent Ferrari tries to cancel his AOL account:

This bit of negative customer service did AOL a world of damage when this story went public in 2006. While it’s an hilarious expose on how bad customer service can be, it is also a warning: If the weakest point of your company is exposed by the right blogger, whether it is just a written complaint or a video or an audio recording, one incident can cost you and your brand dearly.

BTW, as someone who’s had to cancel AOL before myself, I can assure you, that’s how ALL of their employees acted - back then, anyway. The press release AOL issued to stem the flow did nothing more than fan the fires of other angry former customers, each willing and able to share with the world their own experiences.

It’s pretty easy to see how online brand management is going to become a LOT more important to businesses from now on. Slapping a press release response just won’t help anymore if this happens to you.

The biggest problem with social media is that frankly any dummy can now speak loudly.

In fact, that’s what I just did right there! Quick, off the cuff statements like that are among the easiest ways to get someone’s dander up.

I mean, sure, it’s one thing to say that the Internet is now far more democratic, and anyone with a simple connection can now have as much voice as any politician, mobster or PR executive. The problem, however, are the number of occasions when someone will post something that is either largely uninformed or just flat wrong.

With no liable laws being enforced online, (yet,) this usually means people have to get out there and defend themselves. And that’s when you get a Flame War: A hideous little bit of fun that involves hurling insults like a 9 year-old at an otherwise complete stranger, online, in full view of the world. This has been around just about as long as forums, chat rooms, or anywhere you could have a public conversation – and now it’s back.
Chances are good you’re in one right now and you don’t even know it. If someone has started bagging on you on Yelp or Twitter, you need to decide if you’re going to respond, and if you do, how.

What to do if someone starts flaming you

First off, it is important to remember that anyone who takes time out of their day to start blasting you in public is not necessarily your enemy. If this is a client or customer who feels they haven’t been able to get in touch with you any other way, than this is actually an opportunity to get in touch with them privately – emphasis on the “privately.” Because if appeasing this person means giving them a deal you don’t just give anyone, count on others finding the exchange and trying to get the same deal out of you.

Next, remember that someone blasting you in public also isn’t necessarily your friend, or even your problem. Sometimes, people start these fights just to draw attention to themselves. It’s rather like when groups no one had heard of before started protesting Eminem, whom everyone had heard of. By shouting down Eminem, these groups elevated their own position. So it is worth looking at the quality of individual or individuals calling you out, and seeing if a response would really halt the damage, or just give comfort to the enemy.

Finally, as Mad-Eye Moody said, (ask your kids,) you must maintain “constant vigilance!” For starters, you are mad if you don’t have a Google Alert set up for both your own name and your company’s. This will let you know when Google has found any mention of interest. You’ll need to play with it a bit to make sure you’re getting the right you, of course, or company name. For instance, having done this recently for our client Re-bath, I had to make several changes to the keywords selected to keep out any post marked, “re: bath”, which turns up a whole lot more than you’d think.

So keep up on conversations within the more popular social sites. There are a TON of social sites, so you won’t be able to monitor them all on your own. Try to stick to the ones where you know there are a lot of users: Myspace, Facebook, Twitter. The first two have decent enough search to find anyone riding you, and Sumize is the place to go for Twitter.
Then keep tabs on how you turn up in other people’s conversations. And if you aren’t turning up at all… well, at least you aren’t getting flamed, right?

It’s a two-way street, that – at least when people are slamming your company in public, it shows that you’re big enough to be envied!

This Wednesday, July 30th, Paul Peterson and I will be presenting a webinar, as part of the Off Madison Ave Webinar Series, on how to secure earned media coverage through effective pitching to the media. We will be covering a few tricks of the trade that help our Public Relations department consistently deliver media placements for clients. In addition, we will show you how to secure online coverage even if your story angle is not very newsworthy.

We hope to see you online!

I have a phone with Virgin Mobile - but I won’t at the end of the month. This is because I am firing them. Without going into details, they have managed to make me so angry I am seriously considering an iPhone. And I’ve been a customer of theirs for 4 years.

Now, if I remove myself from this and look impartially at Virgin Mobile, I have to say it is such a poorly thought out strategy to turn off customers through poor customer service, especially when your biggest competitor only has to release a slightly new version of their product to get world-wide press.

When a competitor has you over a barrel like that, you need to be twice as good. When you’re only half as good, you are arrogantly announcing that you just don’t need the money or the customers.The first job any client with a monster competitor should be working at is retention. This is best done by considering what it is your competition does that you can’t, but also what you do that they can’t. In this case, iPhone completely owns users who want to go online. Virgin’s strength is (or should be) easy month-to-month, no contract billing. That billing plan is a strength that should be touted, and certainly any problem should be addressed quickly - before, say, a customer posts about their lack of attention to service on their blog.

So I look forward to talking to all of you other iPhone converts!

Here’s a great article from CNet about the hell that Viacom is getting for protecting their intellectual property from YouTube, which ultimately means Google.

Because here’s the problem - people want to watch stuff for free. You can tell them it’s stealling all day long, and they’ll essentially just shrug their shoulders and say, “yeah,” then load up last week’s Daily Show anyway.

The article suggests that Google has been playing up the part of Viacom as Internet bully, but I don’t know that that’s entirely fair. The mention of Eric Schmidt saying Viacom was over litigious isn’t surprising - Viacom was suing him! Similarly, Rodney King found all those police men to be overly violent, even though he didn’t know them terribly well.

I don’ t think Viacom doesn’t look like the big bad bully because of anything Google says. They look that way because we have gotten used to a certain expectation from the Internet. We believe it is to be expected that things you normally have to pay for on cable or satellite should be viewable online. We don’t think of it as stealing - hell, most people who pay for cable even look for this stuff.

It’s really all aboutbeing easy to find and use. Maybe I already have HBO, but I’m in the airport and I want to watch Rome now. Of course, I personally don’t have cable, so when I watch Rome on YouTube I really am stealling.

You have to feel bad for these media companies in a way, as they’re going to be bleeding off content for some time to come. No matter what sto-gaps are put on television shows and movies, the technology allows for easy sharing, and so it will continue into the forseeable future.

Frankly, I think any amount of suing because someone is playing your episode of South Park is spitting in the wind. Even if you do manage to get that 7th grader into court, and win a suit against his parents for $30 million dollars, everyone else will keep on sharing content, and keep on shrugging their shoulders over your rights. Why? Because you’ve let youself come off like such a jerk.

Just look at this story about the RIAA’s war on file swapping from 2003 - after reading this, frankly, I want to go out and steal some music right now.

It all goes back to something I’ve been saying quite a bit lately: You catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar.