Shankar Gupta at MediaPost Publications reports of PriceRitePhoto.com, a Brooklyn, N.Y camera e-retailer, recently found that if you make angry the wrong blogger, life can be turned upside down pretty quickly and with a dangerous outcome.
Due to a terrible experience with the company, a blogger, Thomas Hawk, at Digital Connection blogged about the terrible ordeal. This soon caught fire in the blogosphere, and suddenly the company was losing millions of dollars according to their manager, Howard Baker, with PriceRitePhoto.com Baker goes on to state:
“In the last couple of days there was one disgruntled customer that posted a blog that caused thousands of people to come out of the woodwork and jam our Web site…We’re talking to our attorneys this afternoon, and will probably be taking legal action.”
“They’re basically trying to destroy our business in our busiest month, and they have,” Baker said. “No hard-working small business owner should ever experience something like this.”
This is likened to the story we blogged about as printed in the Forbes article “Attack of the Blogs“(needs registration),where Pete Blackshaw at Intelliseek stated:
“Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality”.
I don’t believe that the blogger had any idea his blog post would cause the magnitude of harm claimed by the company, but the truth of the matter is blogs can have a very lasting impression when credibility is called in question. The company apologized to the blogger but for now the harm has been done. Can they recover from this PR nightmare? Perhaps having a blog of their own to help them wade through the muck that has transpired is a good media and marketing plan.
Blogging is a very fast forum that can do damage in a matter of hours. The best defense against this type of serious problem is perhaps a good offense. Mr. Baker, contact us here at One By One Media, we can let you be the next blogger scorned and perhaps you can present your own blog story about this terrible experience.
[Source: MediaPost Publications]
