10e20 Blog

There has been lots of debate this week about whether social media traffic is good or bad. I lean pretty heavily towards the GOOD side. But let’s look beyond that for a minute and look at another example of the power of social media with two very different companies: Sprint and Linden Lab.

Last week, The Consumerist ran a story titled Sprint Refuses To Cancel Dead Brother’s Cellphone, which told the story of Sprint refusing to cancel the cellphone service of a reader’s dead brother. The most they were willing to “bend” for the reader was to “put the account on vacation,” at $5.95 a month. This story was then subsequently submitted to Digg and quickly went on to get over 5000 Diggs and lots of angry comments. Well, Sprint obviously caught wind of this perhaps due to the emails Diggers were encouraged to send and posts on other blogs such as Billing the Dead. Today The Consumerist updated their website saying that the reader was contacted by a Sprint PR person who bumped his issue way up the ladder and he got the following email:

Thank you for your response to my email. I’m sorry I was on the line when you called. When you are able to, if you would send me the account info (I don’t even have his name at this time) I will take care of resolving this for you. I am truly sorry for the level of customer service you experienced from our representatives.

As Ben from the Consumerist ends his post: Thanks Sprint! All it took was 5150 Diggs and you did the right thing! As someone pointed out in the Digg thread:

This is why digg is sweet. Enjoy the bad publicity, you greedy f*^#ers over at Sprint. Is over 2000 people digging this story plus who knows how many more reading it worth fucking over a guy who’s brother passed away.

The point being that many people dismiss Digg as a bunch of 18-30 year old tech loving geeks but they fail to see how much influence Digg truly has.

Here was another example from this week. Linden Lab the makers of Second Life were faced with an interesting dilemma when a parody site called Get a First Life popped up. Get a First Life encouraged people to “Go Outside” and actually get a life rather then wasting their time playing Second Life which ‘enables users to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse.’

So how did Linden react to this parody and potential ‘threat’ to their business? With humor.

Sunday’s note from Ginsu Yoon, a lawyer for Second Life, started out with the legalese of a standard nastygram — Internet slang for a cease-and-desist letter — but went on to say that “your invitation to submit a cease-and-desist letter is hereby rejected.”

He went on to say (and yes this was confirmed as legit by Linden):

“Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody,” Yoon wrote. “Linden Lab is well-known for having strict hiring standards, including a requirement for having a sense of humor, from which our lawyers receive no exception.”

The AP coverage of this story was submitted to Digg and made the homepage. This time the reactions were MUCH different than the Sprint example above. Comments such as:

Bravo Linden Labs. This is the kind of 21st century thinking large companies need to partake in.

And:

That letter in itself is almost enough to get me to try out Second Life.

Typically once comments start flowing positively on a Digg story – the trend continues (the same works for negative).

Smart companies now have take into account not only how they will be viewed in the press or in blogosphere but also on social networks like Digg. Like it or not – you have to look beyond the good/bad traffic debate and look at the power of social networks for your business as a whole. In this case, neither of these companies were getting traffic directly to their website but the effects of thousands upon thousands of people reading their stories on Digg will sure have a lasting effect.

Posted by Chris Winfield at 6:02 pm
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