(Chuckling and scratching my head...)
If one of our customers decided to freely display our banner logo or a link to our site or a photo of my bald noggin'...with a link AND a favorable review...I'd*:
1) call 'em up and thank 'em,
2) find a way to reciprocate,
3) link back to them...
4) send 'em flowers,
5) get on my knees, really and/or metaphorically or both, and say "Thank you, God for sending them our way..." ,
6) race home to my wife and say "Wow, look!"
7) run through the office and go "hey, check out what this customer did for us...woo-who!"
Paramount Studios sees things differently, it seems. Paramount killed the website of a fan who did just this.
Ben and Jackie at Customer Evangelists share the story of how a devoted movie fan was rewarded by Paramount studio for his enthusiastic and free advertising of one of their upcoming movies. The devoted movie fan is John Campea who runs The Movie Blog. John had the hubris to share his very favorable thoughts on Paramount's upcoming movie Transformer. He was so enthusiastic he included a photo from the movie, as he does for other movies he reviews.
( Remember it was a positive review; it encouraged others to see it; he took the time to write and display a graphic to reinforce his thoughts. Had an agency done so it would be seen as advertising...and it would have been expensive! John's was free to the studio. )
Paramount's reward for this free advertising by a passionate fan, aka WOM or Word-of-Mouth, was first to demand he remove the photo and then...they took his site down. Hey, thanks for your free advertising...!! We don't need you little people...We have 'real' ad agencies, sport.
This is how you kill WOM, positive WOM anyway, Big-Movie-Studio-style.
Ok. So, a SVP from Paramount called from an island vacation to apologize and say that wasn't what was intended...(Shuh, as if...)And as Ben and Jackie point out that's a good thing.
Mistakes do happen. Big corporations have many hands, some seemingly are not only idle but clueless. ( So do small corporations, trust me.) But...taking a fan's site down? That's institutional thinking and only from the uproar on the blogosphere was a response delivered.
But...when you smoke a fan as bad as John was smoked...you're obligated to do more. A LOT more. And do it right then. And John's dialoguing with the SVP. So...who knows.
WOMMA had a presentation on 40-Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to Create [Positive] WOM. This wouldn't be one of them. Maybe at the next WOMBAT show they can have a Top-40 list for WOM-Killers. This would be at, or near, the top. Maybe they could convince the SVP who called them to come and sit on a panel with John Campea to discuss this event. Maybe.
(Still chuckling.. my head's rubbed raw with this one.)
* I've done all of those and more.
Links to 40-Things.
John Moore, Brand Autopsy Blog.
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