The Internet: Making It Harder to Do Bad

Last week, the internet practically exploded when a web entrepreneur told the story of how his Citibank account had been shut down for "objectionable content" on his blog. Bloggers near and far typescreamed a collective "WTF" and all of a sudden, Citi had a PR nightmare on their hands. Their quick and positive response has become a textbook example of how the socially-connected internet is making it far harder to do bad things.

The back story is that late last week, the CEO of fabulis -- a networking site for gay men --tried to make a transaction with its Citibank account, only to discover that Citi had shut down their account because of "objectionable content" on the company's blog. fabulis blogged about the strangeness of the whole thing, and the story got picked up on influential tech news aggregator Hacker News. From there, dozens of blogs -- including this one -- picked up the story.

Was it homophobia? Was it pure business stupidity? Whatever the case, a quick analysis of sentiment reflected in the Citibank conversation as the story blew up showed that it was toxic PR. Social media brand sentiment tracking engine UberVU showed a 10 to 100-fold increase in conversations about Citi because of the story, and a dramatic shift in sentiment from +14 positive (on a scale of 100, positive was 14 greater than negative) to -21 negative.

Interestingly, however, over the weekend Citibank took some big steps, not only responding to the specific case in question, but releasing an updated and clarified policy about how they interact with customers. The ensuing coverage returned the sentiment levels almost to where they were before the blunder.

UberVU's post about this had a great list of "takeaways" from the overall kerfuffle, including the fact that: 1) a single blog post created a PR nightmare, 2) the company responded quickly and proactively and 3) screwing up and then fixing affairs can actually have a net positive brand impact for a company, because people feel like the company is listening.

I take away something else. In the 21st century, the distributed power of the internet allows us to make it much, much harder for companies to do bad, mean, stupid things. Under today's paradigm, companies have no choice but to be more responsive, more transparent and at the end of the day -- better.

Thanks to the nearly 150 readers who sent Citibank messages demanding an explanation for their actions. The net effect is that when we rally to get a company to change a specific policy, we're also embodying a shift in the nature of what companies can and can't do.

Photo Credit: dbking, ubervu