The Other Story on Twitter Tuesday: Best Buy and Laughing Squid

Another storm was brewing on Twitter Tuesday, and it was courtesy of Best Buy. Although the company later apologized in writing, their legal department took the initiative to send Scott Beale of Laughing Squid a cease and desist letter for running a picture of a t-shirt which parodied their brand. Scott had been Tweeting the whole affair starting on December 11

This here is the story unfolding on Scott Beale's Twitter stream.

The story does have a happy ending. After Scott called the Best Buy Corporate Public Relations Group explaining the situation regarding their demand letter, the company quickly issued an apology letter.

While we were discussing the community merits of this tool, Scott was asking his network of 2,948 followers, on Twitter "so my question, where are all the PR bloggers on this issue? It's alright to write about something other than Facebook once in a while."

I have contacted Scott to learn if anything else happened with the DMCA at Rackspace.

Today's post at Fast Company Expert blogs outlines how Cease and Desist letters and lawsuits are not what you'd consider having a customer conversation, especially in this age of rapid information sharing and community support and outreach. If those tools are available to customers, why wouldn't companies use them as well? Conversation is always preferable to taking positions.

Comments

[Kelly Rusk]

Sadly, I'm sure a lot of the people who heard about the C&D letter may never have stuck around to hear about the apology.

Things are a-changing online, and it will likely be a bumpy road for some corporations as they adjust to a new way of dealing with online public scrutiny.

I think we'll see many more 'lessons-learned' like this one in the near future.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Twitter especially is such a real time tool that the news may be old by the time you refresh once ;-)

The good news is that Laughing Squid published the apology letter and is aggregating all of the blog coverage so Best Buy is getting its due credit for doing the right thing in the end.

We will see more cases popping up here and there. The agencies recommending social media are still pushing it as a promotional tool, not understanding the community nature of blogging, etc. They won't get it until they commit to it themselves, and I see very few doing it.