Twitter – the power of negative publicity for One Alfred Place

September 8, 2010 9:55 am admin Online Reputation Management, Twitter

There’s a flurry of tweets this morning from one of the people I follow.  They started off as:

Has anyone else had a bad experience at @onealfredplace?

followed up by …

Yes, the staff at @onealfredplace have been spectacularly rude to me twice in a week. Will be making formal complaint shortly

and evolving to other tweets from the person who was clearly annoyed by a poor level of service from the private business/leisure environment called One Alfred Place.

I’ve never heard of One Alfred Place before but I see from their website (http://www.onealfredplace.co.uk/) that they’re on Twitter.  I wonder whether they’re picking up on such tweets that are spreading negative publicity about them?  Sadly, as with so many companies, they may not be.

So the negative publicity tweets about them, coming from someone who is pretty well respected in business, and has 3,015 followers himself, is spreading outwards.    People like me have picked up on it as a subject to blog about.  Other followers will just make a mental note that One Alfred Place is somewhere to be wary of.  Others, of course, will retweet it onto others in their network.

Bad news spreads faster than good news and while most people will give a supplier of a service a chance (as I know this particular tweeter would have done), there comes a time when the knife goes in.   What would it have taken for the staff to have provided a good service and so avoided the negative publicity via Twitter.  What will the management do now, having found out that the negative publicity is out there (and will likely be visible in Google as well)?

Above all, when will companies start to realise that the offline and online worlds do not exist separately and an offline problem within a business can spread like wildfire online and have a significant knock-on effect?

As I said, I’d never heard about One Alfred Place before but now that I have and the viewpoint was negative, then that’s something that will stay lodged in my brain for awhile.

The lesson here is that at a minimum, companies should be monitoring online talk about their name/brand and be appropriately responsive so that any negative publicity is addressed, which will include handling the issues that caused the negative publicity in the first place.