The Customer Service Survey
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Bad advice?
Friday - February 02, 2007 01:12 PM in
It's become almost a cliche of the Internet era: Little Guy posts something on a web page which tweaks some Big Corporate Entity. Big Corporate Entity gets annoyed, and has BCE's lawyers send threatening legal nastygram to LG.
LG posts the nastygram on his (or her) web page, and the David vs. Goliath element catches people's imagination. Link gets passed around the Internet, and in days the original web page gets thousands of times the amount of publicity it would have otherwise gotten. BCE suffers not just the original negative word of mouth (times a few thousand), but also comes out looking like a bully.
A PR nightmare. Just to add insult to injury, the legal threats usually prove empty or overblown.
This is such a cliche that a couple years ago I discussed exactly this scenario with a lawyer from Faegre & Benson, VocaLabs' attorneys. We weren't discussing any particular event, but exploring how we would respond if someone started posting negative information about VocaLabs online (we also discussed the contrary case: what to do if VocaLabs got a nastygram about something posted on our website).
The lawyer's advice matched my instinct: if we have to respond, respond by engaging the other party in an open dialogue and trying to address their issues. Avoid legal threats at all cost. And if some Big Corporate Entity sends us a legal nastygram, we should milk it for all the free publicity we can manage.
So given the wise advice I received, I was surprised to see that none other than Faegre & Benson sent a threatening legal nastygram on behalf of the National Pork Board to a breastfeeding activist. Her crime? Selling a handful of T-shirts bearing the slogan "The other white milk."
And now....guess what? The National Pork Board looks like a big, bad bully, and the original web page is getting thousands of times more traffic than it would have gotten without all the publicity. The topper is that the Little Guy in this case probably has a strong legal defense in any actual lawsuit: she's not competing against pork, and the T-shirt slogan is almost certainly protected speech under the first amendment.
What gives, Faegre? Did you try to talk your client out of this boneheaded move and they wouldn't budge? Did space aliens steal the brains of your trademark specialists? Didn't anyone stand up and say, "If we send this letter, it's going to get posted to the Internet, and everyone involved is going to look like the bad guy"?
Sometimes, when a client asks "What can we do?" you need to mentally rephrase the question as "What shouldwe do?"
Posted by Peter Leppik
A PR nightmare. Just to add insult to injury, the legal threats usually prove empty or overblown.
This is such a cliche that a couple years ago I discussed exactly this scenario with a lawyer from Faegre & Benson, VocaLabs' attorneys. We weren't discussing any particular event, but exploring how we would respond if someone started posting negative information about VocaLabs online (we also discussed the contrary case: what to do if VocaLabs got a nastygram about something posted on our website).
The lawyer's advice matched my instinct: if we have to respond, respond by engaging the other party in an open dialogue and trying to address their issues. Avoid legal threats at all cost. And if some Big Corporate Entity sends us a legal nastygram, we should milk it for all the free publicity we can manage.
So given the wise advice I received, I was surprised to see that none other than Faegre & Benson sent a threatening legal nastygram on behalf of the National Pork Board to a breastfeeding activist. Her crime? Selling a handful of T-shirts bearing the slogan "The other white milk."
And now....guess what? The National Pork Board looks like a big, bad bully, and the original web page is getting thousands of times more traffic than it would have gotten without all the publicity. The topper is that the Little Guy in this case probably has a strong legal defense in any actual lawsuit: she's not competing against pork, and the T-shirt slogan is almost certainly protected speech under the first amendment.
What gives, Faegre? Did you try to talk your client out of this boneheaded move and they wouldn't budge? Did space aliens steal the brains of your trademark specialists? Didn't anyone stand up and say, "If we send this letter, it's going to get posted to the Internet, and everyone involved is going to look like the bad guy"?
Sometimes, when a client asks "What can we do?" you need to mentally rephrase the question as "What shouldwe do?"
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 01:12 PM by | | | |