The General Motors Facebook fiasco: let’s inject some common sense
By Molly FlattJalopnik.com was the first to spot it and post it before it was pulled.
That eloquent paragraph is the apparent reaction of the daughter of ex-General Motors chief exec Fritz Henderson to his forced resignation, posted on the company’s own Facebook page (there’s still some doubt that it was actually her). Unsurprisingly, old and new media have jumped on the incident. Most, like Mediaite, see it as “just another lesson in how the immediacy and lowered barriers of the Internet have changed all the games” without particularly condemning Sarah Henderson for her reaction, or GM for their no-comment and fairly swift deletion.
But some are adopting a rather muddled scaremongering stance. Alexandra Frean in The Times worries about the “myriad of opportunities for damage to a company’s reputation — as disgruntled customers are able to broadcast their frustration and anger to the world“, a entirely sensible point. But she also blurs the lines between company-facilitated conversation and public WOM: “allowing the public to comment on your company has its risks — requiring eagle-eyed moderators to weed out the rude and unflattering postings. And if you are doing that, you are not really being open at all.”
The problem is that companies aren’t allowing the public to comment on them. The public are doing it regardless. It’s their right. It’s called free speech. Yes, the GM Facebook page is a branded space and therefore subject to their moderation, but Henderson’s opinion could just as easily have been posted on an independent GM fan group or her own profile page or blog. Again, Frean says of an independent Coke Facebook fan group, “Cola decided not to force its closure, risking a backlash, but allow customers to use it as a forum for comment.” Allowed? It’s a dangerous scenario when brands start to think of themselves as the arbiters of the independent net.
Let’s remind ourselves here: Sarah Henderson is not an employee of General Motors. Assuming this really was her, it is understandable that she’s upset about her dad’s situation. Anyone reading that post would have seen it for what it was: an emotional, personal rant. Whether it justly reflected the real subtleties of the CEO conflict is another matter. People are not stupid enough to just read a rant and decide that GM are unmitigated idiots, although, as the folk at The Naughty Bits suggest, they may well admire her for her defensive spunk. We take conversation in its context. It is GM’s right to delete the comment in their own moderated space, and it is her right to take it elsewhere if she likes.
In this situation, GM reaching out to Sarah Henderson, explaining their perspective and listening to her views would probably have been entirely unproductive - it’s too politically fraught and she’s too emotionally involved. But it’s no reason for brands to start panicking about negative WOM. It happens. It always has. And others will always take it with a pinch of salt.
