Once Again, Please the Consumer. Don't Threaten Them

Joey deVilla, a Technical Community Development Coordinator for back office software company Tucows, Inc., publishes a personal weblog on which he recently recounted an experience he had with moving company Quick Boys, mentioned in the comment section of a post he had made about Toronto movers. One of the commenters to the post, who deVilla knew, shared a bad experience with Quick Boys and recommended others steer clear of the company.

A month after the post, deVilla received a phone call at his office from an Eastern European woman, who worked for Quick Boys, who was not pleased with the negative comment found on deVilla's blog and was full of threats and misunderstanding of the ways of the blogosphere. Rather than working calmly with deVilla and the commenter to rectify any negativity generated about Quick Boys, the woman escalated the conversation to her boss, who offered nothing but threats, which all resulted, predictably, in the even more scathing and lengthy post about Quick Boys and their less than customer-centric behavior.

It sounds like a broken record now, but with the rise in popularity of blogs and other forms of consumer generated media, brands are exposed more than ever before to consumer comment, all of which will not be positive. The old methods used by brands to control the conversation are now pointless and laughable. Rather than threatening deVille with legal action, Quick Boys should have offered to remedy the situation with the commenter who had the negative experience thus providing deVille with a positive experience to write about. Publication of that positive experience, rather than the negative one, would have done far greater good to the Quick Boys brand than the current scenario delivered.