Not anymore. According to Chapter 7 of Real-Time Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott, "In the real-time media world, a week is the same as a century. The moment is lost. You've completely blown it! #Fail" (pg. 54).
Amazon.com provides a great example of a company that took too long to respond to a threatening situation. In the summer of 2009, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were for sale as Kindle e-books even though the publisher did not have copyrights to these titles. When this was found out, Amazon.com decided to remove all copies of these books from users' Kindle accounts and refund customers' money, without notifying them in any way. Kindle users around the globe were upset when they realized their e-books had simply vanished with no warning or explanation from Amazon.com and they took to Kindle forums, Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media to express their complaints.
The story was eventually picked up by mainstream media outlets, still with no comment from Amazon.com. Kindle users were upset that the company could take away these books without user permission or without offering any kind of explanation. The company also failed to timely respond to forum discussions, social media activity or customer service related emails, which infuriated the Kindle community. Finally, a week after the news story broke, the CEO of Amazon.com posted an apologetic statement on the Kindle forum. He accepted full responsibility for the issue and promised to make better decisions moving forward.
This simple apology was all Kindle users wanted. The tone of the real-time conversation about Amazon.com and Kindle changed as soon as CEO Jeff Bezos commented on the issue. Had the apology happened a week earlier, as soon as the issue arose, Amazon.com could have prevented a great deal of negative dialogue from customers and the negative story in the mainstream news.
The PR people at Amazon.com did not have a week or even a few days to craft a response to this situation because Kindle users were posting complaints to the Kindle forum, Twitter and blogs as soon as their books were removed. The week of no comment by Amazon.com gave the impression that the company didn't care about users' frustrations. In a real-time media world, companies have to realize the importance of getting the first word in every conversation with customers. Regardless of whether the conversation is good or bad, companies must learn to respond to customers in real-time, because if they don't someone else will.
If companies would just understand the art of good timed responses, we wouldn't have this problem. I just received shoes in the mail that I ordered online. They sent size 9 shoes in a size 6 box. I haven't been able to get through to the company to fix the problem! It has been almost a week now.
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