It's been mentioned several times that Amazon really failed because they didn't jump right on into the conversation on Twitter. Twitter is the absolutely worse place to play wait-and-see on. It goes against the very spirit of it.
Yes you're a fair corporation. Yes, overall you're caring. No, there was not any intentional ill will: Amazon's HRC in regards to LGB employees and company benfits for their partners is, simply, outstanding.
But, you came off as a cold machine by not diving in. Your customer base is the online community. You must be able to adapt as they adapt to new venues of communication. You didn't want to mispeak before you got the information. Alright. You could still talk and not mispeak at the same time. @amazon We are aware of the situation and are investigating it. We'll keep you updated. @amazon We think we have it narrowed and are working on a fix.
Look. No company secrets. No misteps. No hiccups.
AND YOU ARE STILL NOT DOING THIS!
I can understand the letters. Not having all the information on this, I'll say very little. Miss and non-communication happens all the times in large companies. Some times some trends indicating a potential problem are simply missed. Not a big deal if you work on a fix on this "glitch" as well.
But there is an underlying problem. It's not intentional. It's not malicious, but it does have the same affect as both. There is absolutely no reason why children's books and young adult novels should ever, for any reason, have an adult tag. It doesn't matter what orientation the characters. Dumbledore was gay. The books even touched on one of his past relationships. But guess what, not a sex scene, implied or otherwise, was even used.
There is a double-standard at play here. (Again, I don't feel it's intentional.)
Why does a romantic book aimed at young readers have anything to do with sex, even if the main character is gay? If you changed the name and gender of the character, but no other words, why would that be less racy?
Is it because same-sex relationships are nothing but sex, sex, sex? Do most people not think that there are the same, everyday problems, with a few more obsticles, involved in those? Is Fran and Ann down the street only going on errands to take a break?
#amazonfail is a little bit more of a magnifying glass on where we stand on equality. Unless we can see a relationship as a relationship, we have a problem.
You see a nuclear family in the park, the parents holding hands, you think "What a beautiful family." You see Heather and her Two Mommies doing the same, you think "Oh, sexy"? This is a double-standard we have to work on. And Amazon is one place where it shows.
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"You see a nuclear family in the park, the parents holding hands, you think "What a beautiful family." You see Heather and her Two Mommies doing the same, you think "Oh, sexy"? This is a double-standard we have to work on. And Amazon is one place where it shows. "
ReplyDeleteAmazon did no such thing. A non-native speaker accidentally set the "adult" flag on a category that wasn't about sex. Works that had nothing to do with LGBT were affected as well. It's just that people with works in the other categories don't feel so marginalized that they have to be on the constant lookout for "censorship" or whatever.
No, but there is still is the problem of why LGBT and books on sexuality and disability were disproportionately much more affected than those involving straight couples. I understand that there was an accident to cause this, but there's something a bit strange about how many of those books were kind of lumped together to get flagged like that.
ReplyDeleteThey were not disproportionately affected, they were disproportionately noticed. For all we know, most of the 57,000 impacted items could have been about salad dressing.
ReplyDeleteA bit more seriously, one of the very specific known impacts was on books about dealing with rape survival. That doesn't mean Amazon thinks that's "sexual" or "erotic" either.
ANY category could have been accidentally suppressed as a result of this mistake. It just so happens that the one which was suppressed is one that people are very sensitive about.
You make a very good point and may very well be right about which books were hit. But neither of us may never know, with the small amounts Amazon's saying on the issue.
ReplyDeleteBesides just the perceived correlation of titles, there are still a few problems such as how long this was allowed to go on before Amazon seemed to take notice.
On to the problem that existed before the recent mistake.
I have a feeling they may need to take another look at the system they have in place to catch trends coming in from customer service on both buyer's and supplier/author/publisher/etc's ends. There were the books that had the problem long before the mishap on the site in France.
There's still been no public comment on that, as far as I've seen.
Yes, that is true, and there's also the issue of why they have an adult filter to begin with; people think it's because Amazon wants to "censor" things but really it's because the catalog system doesn't have a more graceful way to implement a "safe search" sort of thing, and they don't want lurid materials making it to the front page. But the very presence of the filter has raised a lot of peoples' ire.
ReplyDeleteWhen I worked there I did know one of the category editors, and she said that the third-party vendors often tried really hard to sneak porn onto the site - for example, vendors selling sports bras and lingerie being put on (but not yet covering the parts which need to be covered).
The thing is that the catalog system is basically held together with paperclips and duct tape. It's 14 years of cruft that's accumulated and been hacked together, and it's amazing it runs as well as it does. Simply cleaning it up is a monstrous undertaking, seeing as how there's millions of items with thousands of vendors.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the next five years there were another major fuck-up on the same scale, but it probably won't affect LGBT material and so if it's even noticed it probably won't raise that big of a stink.
I'm glad that the Internet in general has decided that LGBT issues are a major cause to pick up, but I'm not so glad that Internet people still choose to pick it up in the form of shoot-first-ask-questions-later-and-then-ignore-the-answers.
On your last point, Twitter isn't exactly built for the ask-first type of conversation. Which is why it was so vital for Amazon to jump right in. They're still missing the boat, and to a degree, the point.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the system goes, I understand the corporation thing as far as stock-holders and major changes are concerned. And I feel that in the case of a major overhaul, it's enormously counter-productive. It's always a bit hard convince bean counters that something will be good for the company, because they only see numbers and they only care about the numbers right now. But if the current software continues, and you're right about a future problem, individual authors and publishers are kind of rolling the dice on whether their books are going to do well on the site.
Well, why is the onus on Amazon to immediately join every conversation that's happening about it when it doesn't have a formal presence there?
ReplyDeleteTo use a silly but similar example, let's say that there's a discussion panel going on at a comic book convention, and the topic turns to Amazon's comic book sale policies. There is no Amazon representative at this convention. The discussion quickly spirals out of control into an Amazon hate-fest, and because Amazon isn't there to respond, they can't quell the rising discontent. Should it be Amazon's burden to pay attention to every single comic book convention?
Keeping it Web-based, do they need to have a presence on every single social networking site? Do they need to be on Livejournal, Facebook, Myspace, and every flash-in-the-pan messaging platform which comes along? Most individuals still don't see the merit to Twitter. Why should a 15-year-old corporation be expected to follow every single trend?
Amazon doesn't have a presence on Twitter, and they don't want a presence on Twitter. The angry mob rallied on Twitter and then took it to Amazon, and Amazon was completely unprepared to make a response.
As a corporation they are slow, disorganized, and try to be careful. They are most definitely not a web 2.0 company, and personally I think it's a good thing. They work for the long term, and try to take care in everything they do. Unfortunately, the web 2.0 crowd demands immediate responses and quick fixes to problems which end up escalating much more quickly than they can be diagnosed. People were already riled up and out for blood long before anyone at Amazon had any idea there was an issue.
The initial reaction to the initial CSR response was a major overreaction, too; the author asked the CSR why the book was being suppressed, the CSR looked up the book and saw "Oh, it's filed as adult content," and then copy-pasted the boilerplate about adult content. They had absolutely no reason to try to see why it was adult content or if it was appropriate, and there was a massive snowball effect as a result because people are cynical and always assume that companies are out to screw them over.
Well, of course it's up to them. But in the name of PR, it's not a bad idea to use the medium to your advantage. I really doubt this would still be trending had they not.
ReplyDeleteAnd your example doesn't fit because Amazon DOES have representation on Twitter. They just didn't use it to help communicate and guide the conversation. They can choose not to use it to help curb the snow ball affect, just as people who know they have twitter accounts have the right to feel like they've been ignored by their near-silence.
On a side note: I have worked for a large corporation, and I do understand your frustration. Every time something happened at a few stores in the chain, people cried that it was corporate policy when it wasn't. It was just something bad going on in those particular stores.
ReplyDeleteI've been on both sides of the issue. But I feel strongly about this because I love books. I love their authors, and I know that not every one of them is J.K. Rowling. What may be a small problem on Amazon's side can lead to a huge problem affecting the livelihood many people. That's another problem with this.
Here is a good summary of why it may be better to go to your consumers instead of waiting on them to come to you.
ReplyDeletehttp://vitaminimc.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazon-steps-on-its-own-tail.html
Okay, I see that Amazon does have a Gold Box thing on Twitter. But that's a completely different part of the company.
ReplyDeleteEven if they did have a specific PR point on Twitter, Amazon's communications policies are very old-school. A big part of that is they are very careful when it comes to investor relations, and want to avoid stepping on the SEC's toes and so on.
Basically, they might have a Twitter presence but they're not part of the conversation. It's a huge company with thousands of people spread all over the globe. One person can't immediately speak in response to a dogpile which occurs because of the actions of another.
Amazon also has very strict policies when it comes to talking about internal issues with the outside world. That is what really needs to change if they want to keep up with the web as it is today, and sure, I'd like to see them get a bit more responsive and on-the-ball with that, but I think a big part of the twitterpile was because people expect them to behave like a web2.0 company when really they're not. They are a very old-school company which happens to operate primarily on the web.
Small nimble companies can do very well on Twitter. I see plenty of small companies where the founders and CEO are on Twitter and work it to their advantage. But Amazon is not a small company with a small number of product offerings, and Jeff Bezos is a very busy person who already spreads himself too thin. Not that he needs to be the one who talks to the world at large, of course, but I'm just saying that Amazon operates on a wholly different scale than, say, CDBaby or Comcast or whatever. (I realize that @comcastcares isn't anyone particularly high-up in Comcast but they only have a few product offerings and so a single CSR actually is capable of being on the ball on everything going on everywhere in the company. Amazon has dozens of departments each with dozens of product groups, and no one CSR there can even pretend to know everything.)
Okay, I see that there is actually a company representative twitter too. Of course, Twitter is going really slow right now so I have no idea what it's even being used for.
ReplyDeleteOr, in other words, #twitterfail OMG WHY ISN'T TWITTER IMMEDIATELY TELLING US EVERYTHING ABOUT SLOWNESS
Ah, and it's not actually a PR/CS thing, it's just another way for them to provide their general marketing stuff.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, it's still in line with what I said: Amazon uses Twitter for marketing, not for a conversation.
Yeah. This whole thing got messed up. It'll be interesting to see if any changes, either in their categories/tagging/etc or in the way they handle Twitter storms in the future.
ReplyDeleteI'm also really hoping that it sparks a review at least on how they keep tracks of trends and such. Perhaps a scheduled review of recently categorized and tagged items? I know there's tooooooooons of items, but maybe creating a department specifically to handle that wouldn't be bad. I'm sure no one would complain about Amazon creating even more jobs. ;)
Well, at this point it would be very very difficult and expensive for them to change the way they handle categories or tagging. Twitter-storm handling is definite low-hanging fruit, though, and it would be extremely useful for them since there are plenty of other places that Twitter-storms could happen (for example, I can imagine #kindledrmfail or something, which has absolutely nothing to do with the catalog system).
ReplyDeleteThey already have departments specifically for categorizing/tagging items, split along product categories. There is a lot of redundancy and weirdness, and they have to deal with all sorts of crap that third-party vendors do (which is why there will often be separate ASINs for the same item with completely different metadata, categories, etc.). Again, I don't see that changing any time soon.