birddog

Underestimating social media; a recipe for disaster

Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a woman plagiarised. That is, a woman plagiarised, with the majority of the internet on her side. Here is a long and evolving story as short as I can possibly make it:

On Wednesday last week (3rd November), Monica Gaudio, a food/crafts writer in the United States, blogged on her personal LiveJournal site that an article on apple pie recipes, which she’d written in 2005 and copyrighted as such on a web domain that she owns, had been reproduced in the October 2010 issue of the advertiser-funded, for-profit Cooks Source Magazine, without her permission.

Monica emailed the Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs asking for an apology to be posted on the magazine’s Facebook page, and a donation of $130 made to the Columbian School of Journalism. Said editor replied in the negative, saying that Monica should have been grateful for the exposure, and that since she’d had to edit the piece before publishing it (unlawfully), Monica should actually pay her. The editor then proceeded to trumpet her three decades’ experience as an editor that had given her sound knowledge of copyright law, before stating triumphantly (and quite wrongly) that the ‘web is a public domain’ and therefore the magazine had done nothing wrong.

It had, of course. And how: by Friday morning, the story had gone viral and global. Hundreds of people commented and continue to comment on Monica’s blog; thousands more have linked to it. Twitter went into overdrive; influential bloggers drummed up their support. The obligatory ‘Hitler Reacts’ YouTube video was made. The magazine’s Facebook page (which has now been deleted) became swamped with several thousand comments, each one increasingly vitriolic. Someone even wrote a song. Overwhelmed by the response, the Cooks Source website was taken down for several days.

All this gives you a very bad rep if you’re a brand. But reputations can be managed if you act quickly. Cooks Source and more specifically Judith Griggs failed to do so, and as a result, it is more than their reputation that has taken a hit since this story went around the world: several advertisers have removed their business from the magazine.

To summarise all that, since it is quite extraordinary: one hopelessly misjudged email (and rather foolish rudeness on the individual’s part) has cost a magazine – a business like any other – a chunk of its revenue. And as the magazine is distributed for free, that revenue stream is especially important.

Is it only a matter of time before big business slips up too? After all, this is a saga with potentially scary implications. Social media publicity nightmares are well documented (GAP last month a case in point), but here now is an instance of tangible financial loss directly attributable to social media vilification. Granted, Cooks Source has nowhere near the PR muscle or corporate size to simply absorb such a mass online condemnation, but as what has happened makes clear, this modern form of virtual justice often bears little relation to the magnitude of the crime, regardless of who committed it.

It appears that the magazine was simply not au fait with how the increasingly social internet has brought a “fundamental shift in power between publisher and reader”. When Ms Griggs sent that snide email to a seasoned blogger, it is unlikely that she would even have considered the consequences. Her magazine was left like a sitting duck, unable to defend itself from an internet on a righteous rampage.

The Cooks Source website now carries a lengthy statement that, among other things (including a bewildering indictment of Facebook and an attempt to absolve themselves from full blame), does at least offer an apology to the wronged blogger. But it is now too late – the damage, to their business and their brand, has been done. If lessons such as these aren’t learned from, this won’t be the last time the social internet claims a victim.

Tim Miller
Content Editor