BrainStorm

It only took one day.

Heath Ledger’s tragic passing on January 22nd was accompanied by a San Diego Best Buy store clerk bumble (Best Buy Cashes In on Heath Ledgers’ Death) within hours of his passing. Well that only took about 4 hours…what took one day was for the news to become the hottest topic on the blogoshpere with a picture of the makeshift display being sent to bestweekever.com and the corresponding digg post to reach upcoming in about 2 hours. At the time of this posting the story has 3744 diggs.

What also took a day was Best Buy’s reponse to this controversy. By 2pm on the Best Buy website newsroom an apology was issued. Here’s the problem. The press release is on a website news room tool that you can’t rss, copy a url or even comment on. The apology was not front and center any where on the Best Buy main site or even on the entry page to the news site.

What’s worse is that Best Buy did nothing to respond to the negative posts and comments circulating across social media sites worldwide. Check out some of the comments from the digg post (these are the first 5 responses to the post in order)

Once again best buy is at the cutting edge of moral bankruptcy. Kudos guys, kudos.

Look at the bright side, if you go to Hell you know there will be a Best Buy there along with a Blockbuster.

It’s Best Buy…. what did you expect????

It’s Best Buy….. what did you expect? Moral decency? Who needs that when you can sell products…….

It really is sad. I’m sure that some of the higher-ups behind The Dark Knight are also quietly grinning because of his death due to the increase in viewers they’ll get. Disgusting.

I actually called Best Buy’s media relations department in Minnesota to offer to help with social media relations…to take the press release and “comment” on the negative posts with Best Buy’s response. I got a voicemail and no returned call.

FYI…I checked Best Buy’s stock and it dropped $2 the day after the news broke. And of course traditional media was no where to be found on this one.

Lesson learned.  Someone somewhere with a camera phone is watching your every move. Do stupd stuff and you will be found out. And when you are found out you better have a strategy to use this kind of negative buzz to have a conversation with your consumers. Make your high-priced low performing PR firm get off their retainer and address the negative dialogue.

Of course you could do like Target and pretend as if social media doesn’t exist.

Share This

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 8:11 pm and is filed under New Media, Social Media, blogs, Social Media PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.