A week or so ago, the Twitterverse and Facebook were awash with this rather interesting ‘testimonial’ for an online company specialising in accident claims.
To the right of a rather bland description of how this company works, a pull quote had been placed, pretty much where you’d expect to see a pull quote or testimonial. A screenshot that I captured for posterity shows the evidence…
My first thought that they had either been hacked, or a very disgruntled former employee had made a speedy exit from the company but had left his mark on the way. “I give that a couple of hours max before that gets pulled,” I mused.
Naturally, an eagle eyed person had come across this and alerted the world to the quote. I had a giggle and thought nothing much more about it.
A full four days passed and I saw reference to the same quote on someone else’s post. Four whole days and nobody had noticed at the company’s head office! I took another look and sure enough the offending quote was still there – and a quick search on Twitter revealed many hundreds of people had not just commented on it but also retweeted to their followers and friends. That was a hell of a lot of pointers to view the site.
Now, whether this was intentional (some people thought it a strange but very public way of drawing attention to themselves in a ‘viral’ way) or whether the site had been hacked, I don’t know. There were a few comments that inferred ‘ambulance chasers’ deserved everything they got, and if it was a hack, then it was a pretty effective one at that.
My point, however, is that it should never have lasted as long as it did. Even with all this noise about their site becoming ever louder, the company did not hear it, and so did not amend their site for a further 24 hours!
If there’s a moral to the tale, I guess in a public world it’s essential to try and be aware of what people are saying about you. Any number of filters are out there for the asking, making it a doddle to monitor when your company has been mentioned in public. And some social media monitoring companies go many steps further than that with highly sophisticated reporting methods that will drill far deeper.
In the same way that it only takes one bad mouthing customer to undo the work of hundreds of satisfied customers, a single mistake can get you remembered for completely the wrong reasons.
A week later the site is still ‘not taking on any new business’ so I presume a rock solid, bomb proof website and social media platform is being built as we speak.
If it isn’t it bloody well should be…
