Hell Hath No Fury like a Scorned Twitter User

People... in the age of social media it is not the best idea to anger a Twitter user. They complain, loudly, to their followers. Their followers in turn, retweet to THEIR followers, and so on and so on. Perhaps it's a common ordeal like slow cable service or bad phone service. But every so often it's a BIG ordeal, like.. oh, say, a DEAD MOUSE IN A PRE-PACKAGED SALAD.



Recently, a downtown Minneapolite purchased a pre-packaged salad from the Au Bon Pain in the skyway system. After two bites, she noticed something that definitely wasn't listed on the ingrediants label- a dead mouse. Disgusted, she walked the salad back to the store and showed the manager. The manager apologized, took her contact information, and refunded her money. But was this enough? She didn't think so.

The woman promptly emailed Au Bon Pain, explaining the situation and demanding compensation for the ordeal. In addition, the email was forwarded on to colleagues and friends, complete with photographs of the mouse. Finally, the Twitpic of the salad reached Twitter and has been retweeted among the Twin Cities Twitter community with a warning against the restaurant.

This all may have been avoided with additional care for the situation by the manager. As stated in the email "This is not a 'placate her with coupons' situation." From a public relations stand point, the benefit well outweighs the cost of going the extra mile with a (hopefully) rare situation such as this. Taking extra care can avoid a social media crisis that can seriously damage this brand's reputation.

At the moment when searching Twitter search simply on "Au Bon Pain," the majority of posts are about the dead mouse incident. With Twitter now being used as a search engine to find opinions and advice on brands, a search like this can do serious damage.

I sincerely hope Au Bon Pain corporate rectifies the situation, perhaps ala Dominos.

P.S. Apologies if the photo ruins your appetite... be assured that mine has taken a vacation for the next 3 days or so.

Google Ad Placement Fail

What do you do when Gmail goes down? Mostly, I talked about it on Twitter, kept checking my Google reader for more articles, and chatted on iGoogle.

While going through my Reader, it seemed all my blogs are talking about it: AgencySpy, TechCrunch and Mashable... Mashable has some ideas for what to do while Gmail is down, but the funniest part of seeing their article when it popped up in my Google Reader was that they are supported by in-RSS-reader Google Ads.

FAIL:
The ad reads: Buying another expensive email server made me go Google.