I’ve never worked as a publicist, but even I know that one of the immutable rules of PR is that you bury bad news at a time when no one’s paying attention. That either means at the same time as a major news story — such as the overzealous British government official who got into trouble for trying to time a news dump to the Sept. 11 attacks — or, more commonly, before a weekend (or even better, a holiday weekend). Yet during the past holiday weekend, Amazon.com got a lesson in how the social web has turned that equation on its head.
Quick background: At some point recently (possibly as far back as February, Amazon tweaked its categorization algorithm to mark a number of gay-themed books as “adult”, which limited their appearance in searches and erased their sales rankings. The company claims it was a “glitch“, and I’m inclined to believe them, mostly because I can’t imagine what they would have possibly had to gain by doing it on purpose. But what’s interesting is that, in this case, having a story like this break over a holiday weekend proved to be terrible timing for Amazon. While Amazon employees enjoyed Easter with their families, the story bubbled up throughout the Twittersphere, to the point where the Twitter hashtag “#amazonfail” became the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter Search. By the time those employees returned to work this morning, their company had pretty much been convicted of homophobia in the Court of Internet Public Opinion, and even worse, had let those accusations go mostly unchallenged.
Assuming it was, in fact, a glitch, Amazon will likely recover from this misstep. Still, it’s a good lesson in how the Web scrambles traditional business strategies. The CW on dumping bad news is based on the assumption that companies can gain an advantage by working hard at a time when most news consumers are relaxing (Friday night newscasts and Saturday editions of the newspaper traditionally have the smallest audiences of the week). But these days, companies are increasingly finding that their audiences are willing to work harder than they are, especially when those audiences are sufficiently riled up. And they no longer need the megaphone of mass media to keep stories alive.
