Countless brands and organisations have made online blunders in recent years, whether it’s been revealing sensitive data or making a Twitter faux pas. But do you think any less of the company after it’s messed up?
A few weeks ago Sony’s PlayStation Network experienced an unknown outage. However, the people at Sony were soon forced to reveal in a blog post that “intruders” had actually forced their way into the PSN which could have resulted in them obtaining a great deal of personal data, including credit card information. The week before that Wordpress announced that it had had a similar security breach after hackers broke into several of its key servers.
It’s not just information that causes problems online, I’ve lost count of the amount of times big brands have made a silly error with misplaced tweets, just look at the likes of Habitat, Vodafone or fashion designer Kenneth Cole to name a few.
Whether it’s a random attack by hackers, an erroneous tweet by a work experience intern or just a genuine mistake, online users and customers get angry. This is understandable if there’s been a global security leak and your details might be affected, but at the same time many people have a habit of overreacting at the smallest of errors.
The fact is that as more companies venture into social media, store important information in huge databases online or experiment with anything else the Internet has to offer, these kinds of attacks and mistakes are unfortunately inevitable. After all, companies have always made mistakes, revealed information they shouldn’t or faced unfortunate PR disasters. Changes in the technology we use and reliance on online media just means this is a different space in which to make mistakes and people find out quicker than ever before.
So, the all-important question is does it really matter? Does your perception of a company change following a so-called online fail or would it take more than a quickly resolved data leak or sweary tweet for you to think less of your favourite brand?
Becca Caddy is a BitchBuzz Tech columnist and freelance writer. She is also the UK editor of US-based tech blog Popgadget.net. You can follow her @beccacaddy or read her blog beccacaddy.com
Image via Twitter.com.