Good post by Clay Shirky on the #amazonfail incident, and how the Twitter Mob rushed to judgement and got it wrong – and are now trying to justify their continued dislike of Amazon.
Which is all true, but it neglects the second and more important point – Amazon have done themselves no favors in how they’ve responded to this. If they’d got out in front of it as Dominos did,it wouldn’t have been a big thing. Truly just an embarrassing “glitch”.
But instead they gave out confusing messages from low-level operatives – no one took control, so the Twitterati made their own mind up. First mistake – they should have been all over this from the outset.
My colleague Dave Droar made the observation that they’re probably so internally focused they thought the thing to do was fix the bug in their systems; however the real problem wasn’t a minor bug in the display of books, it was out there in their customer base and their relationship with them.
How different would this have been if a few of the Amazon techies had come out on their blogs with detail on what happened, why, and how it was being fixed. Open the curtains, let some sunlight in, and show there’s nothing fear. An apology from someone senior, problem solved. Instead silence. There was one off-the-record chat but that’s it, which feels rather shallow – you’d expect more sources for that kind of stuff.
This is all the more crazy from a company that’s quite good at getting out there and being visible in the community – when things are going well!
Even now, there’s no one from Amazon out there talking at a senior level, engaging with the community. Twitter is still making the conversation.
I wonder why this is? – I can think of a few possible reasons:
- Amazon’s leadership have failed – they either don’t understand it’s an issue or they haven’t got the guts to step up. Either way, heads should roll, because when the time came they weren’t up to the job.
- The explanation we’re currently being given isn’t completely accurate and they’re trying to figure out some damage control. Ohhh dear. (I note a search for “Homosexuality” still doesn’t return sensible results – how long does this “glitch” take to fix?).
- The company is just structurally unable to respond to this kind of issue. Maybe it isn’t joined up in the right way, maybe no one has the authority – who knows?
- Despite being a child of The Internet, Amazon is firmly Big Business 1.0 and finds the whole thing bewildering. “We keep doing what we should do and nothing works – let’s just ignore them”.
That the Twitterati might have jumped to the wrong conclusion is regrettable. That Amazon left them to it is indefensible.
Amazon – we want to love you, we do. Please don’t be a case study in how not to do this. You’re currently being outclassed by a Pizza chain.
Update 1: fuel for the “It wasn’t really a glitch” fire.
Update 2: Good advice for what Amazon should have done (albeit from a company that would happily provide them with a service!).
Following on from #amazonfail, we have Domino’s Pizza who also got into serious trouble over the Easter Weekend when two employees videod themselves doing quite horrible things in food preparation, and posted it on YouTube.
“Global Brands” live off a vision of perfection which can’t possibly stand up to the level of scrutiny that’s no longer possible when every bad thing that might happen is immediately exposed to the world. Quite often these brands are in people-centric service industries, which means they are widely-dispersed and with low-paid staff. You can’t possibly imagine nothing bad is ever going to happen – it always has, just now we hear about it, quickly – and form judgements before the Corporation can react.
I wonder how this is going to play out…
- Maybe we’ll all gain a maturity of understanding and perspective – nothing is perfect. That’s going to take a lot.
- Perhaps Brands will try to develop a level of paranoia and control which rivals the Drug Industry in terms of preserving the integrity of their product and operations. That will no doubt require a serious upgrade in the people who are in customer-facing positions. The people who get part time jobs in fast food joints are also the kind of people who’d think it was funny to mess around when the boss is out and post it on the Internet.
- Hopefully we’ll realise the truth behind the fast food brands and perhaps eat more healthily! Got to think that YouTube video will do more for healthy eating than a government educational campaign.
- It could be that global brands just collapse under the weight of unrealistic expectations (or pretensions). They claim to be perfect, but we’ll be faced with a continuous stream of believable evidence that they aren’t, which the brand will respond to with more corporate-speak, thus discrediting them more.
Interesting times indeed. We used to have Pizza delivered to the office quite regularly, but perhaps not any more! Should do our diets a lot of good….
I’ve been watching the whole “Amazon Fail” thing with some interest. I won’t rehash the story – here’s a good write up, one of many.
Aside from the whole values thing – which is a personal thing and isn’t really interesting – more interesting is “How on earth did this happen?”.
Either this was a thing sanctioned at the highest levels, in which case you’d expect there was full engagement up the management tree, and they’d be all over the reaction and managing it. That doesn’t seem to be the case.
Or someone in Amazon allowed their personal views to over-influence an initiative they’d been entrusted with. Perhaps there was a view that some categories of books (really really extreme stuff) shouldn’t be promoted, so a project was setup to do something about it. Code was written to allow certain books to be suppressed from rankings. Someone was given the task of deciding what – and their view of what should be suppressed was perhaps a little wider than one would expect. Either they didn’t appreciate the backlash would occur or didn’t care.
This second choice fits better with the available data – they appear to be somewhat taken aback with the reaction. There’s no coordinated response, and in fact deafening silence really. Why don’t they have a rapid response team – it wouldn’t take more than one person with a brain, surely.
One thing that does occur – this is a massive failure of leadership from a company we’d all expect to be very Internet-savvy. Their senior guys should be out in front of this, very visible, engaging with their customers. So far, nowhere to be seen.
This raises an interesting question – large companies are totally thrown by The Internet, The Social Web etc. They can’t seem to think at the same rate as Twitter – but they’re going to need to find a way or die. Amazon’s brand has taken a real hammering these past few days.
Some would say that the solution is for large companies to develop a more human face, perhaps even a soul. I’m not sure that’s possible given the nature of “the organisation”. Maybe this is another area where small, focused companies have the advantage – they’re smaller so they’re going to have a tighter culture, and quicker decision making paths. Plus they get to make lots of small mistakes, rather than lots of really big visible mistakes.
There’s lots of dicsussion about the problems of being a small company Vs the large company. I have to wonder if that’s being turned on it’s head, and now the problem is how do you overcome the disadvantages of large companies – something that’s been confronted before (in history, it took a while to figure out how to run a large company) but we kind of thought the problem was solved – big was always good! And then The Internet arrived, with a whole new set of problems, which I think we’re still struggling with.
Update: Here’s the report on Channel 4 news. Where’s Amazon here? Currently we’re only hearing from overwhelmed low level people – this is a time for the CEO to step up. Either he doesn’t realise what’s happening (ooohhhh dear) or he does and doesn’t know what to do (even worse). It must suck to run an International brand but then again, don’t play if you cant’ keep up.
Update 2: Maybe it’s a hacker. Which is plausible (but unverified). Still doesn’t excuse or explain Amazon’s paralysis. Why don’t they have one person who can evaluate the situation and respond with integrity?
Update 3: from @allisoncoles: (she’s perceptive/devious!) – if you were Amazon, and were in this much dodo – wouldn’t you want it to be a “hacker” who did all those mean things? How much would it be worth? So much easier than ‘fessing up.
Update4: There’s a post on one of the BBC blogs which wraps it all up, and apparently Amazon have given a rather strange apology. They’re acting very corporate about all this – not sure that’s the right approach. They’ve just left so many questions hanging.
Update 5: Here’s a good article on the impact of social media and large companies.
