Political campaigns, celebrity gossip, controversial human rights topics were all over the internet, and due to the anonymity of the online world, anyone could say anything and be protected from persecution. Blogging created a new lifestyle for people, shortly after grew social media sites such as Myspace, Facebook and now the infamous Twitter.
All of a sudden, all the little things that you normally wouldn’t hear about on your local news channel were coming to light and it was coming fast. If a company mistreated an employee, if a store had a disgruntled customer, if a restaurant had bad hygiene, consumers were not afraid to let the world know about it. With up to the second live updates and feeds like Facebook and Twitter, large corporations who have been getting away with a lot of things we may never know about, are all of a sudden getting put under the hot seat. People have begun to take “justice” into their own hands, after all, what is worse than having your company logo tagged to an embarrassing story on Facebook and Twitter and there is nothing you can do about it?
Here’s the thing, the average Joe or in my case the average Mary, will be inclined to believe what my friend @johnnyhotcakes has to say on Twitter about a certain store or a certain product before I believe what the company has to say to me and his experience may be the make or break as to whether I return to that store again, buy that product again, or spread the news at how horrible they both are. People are easy to base their judgments on what others have encountered as they feel they can relate to them rather than what someone in a suit has to"legally" say to me. Some of this is a good thing, I think a lot of companies have to be held accountable for things that 20 years ago they could have either gotten away with, or paid some money under the table and the issue never existed, the exposure of fraud, lies, scandal, is so much more detrimental when done on the internet through social media than being fought in court (if it ever reaches court) with fancy lawyers and huge price tags.
The power that people have now, no matter what their motives are, is something that companies have to start taking into consideration, when they send out that company email or when they respond to a consumer who has issued a complaint, because they may not be held liable in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion, where their reputation and consumer review weighs heavily, they will be tarnished forever.
Till next time bloggers and bloggettes….toodles!
