Jump! Blog Social Media Love

Whats that coming over the hill? Is it a PR nightmare?

Horizon Realty have got a few things to learn about reputation management and social media…

The company are attempting to sue twitter user @abonnen (followed by just 20 other users) for £50,000 after she sent the following tweet to a friend:

Now, they could have let it slide quietly away, witnessed by only a small handful of people, that would likely have been the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to deal with the situtaion.  They could have used social media properly and responded to the issue, showing that they cared about their customer , that would have been the most sensible way to deal with it and would likely have improved their reputation as a company. Of course, instead of the first two options, they decided to blow the situation out of all proportions creating a huge amount of bad press and bad will for themselves…

Yesterday most of us probably hadn’t heard of Horizon Realty, with todays news their brand image has been tainted, internationally, by moldy appartments, customer bullying and money grabbing…

It doesnt even matter if any of these things are true or not, attacking a customer for complaining about your service (especially with law suits) is a sure way to:

• Make you look guilty of whatever your customer is complaining about.
  
• Alienate your existing and future customers.
  
• Make the inital molehill in to a huge bad PR mountain.

Spokesman for Horizon, Jeffrey Michael, was quoted to say:

“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization”.

Stories which feature customer bullying through, or because of, social media tend to become very visable very quickly these days and I’d suggest that this policy is in need of an urgent review…