CRM's gone social - are you talking with your customers?

Customers are talking to each other much more than before.  People are linking themselves into tribes of like-minded individuals.  This has been happening for about ten to fifteen years, and accelerated (or reached critical mass) the past four or five years.

Let’s start with a story from January, 2008.  The Black Mustang Club is a group of people with black Ford Mustang cars - they are passionate about their cars, and wanted to put out a calendar, showing some of these cars.  They went to the cafepress.com online store to get them printed. 

Somehow, Ford’s lawyers got involved with cafepress.com, and cafepress.com declined to print the calendars.  The club members came to believe that Ford was claiming intellectual property rights to privately taken photos of their privately owned cars. 

(http://www.bmcforums.com/showthread.php?t=42402&page=3)

This caused what might be called an “Internet Firestorm” as thousands of other sites linked to the original posting.  Many of these were free speech sites, consumer-rights sites, etc.  Ford began to look stupid and perhaps evil.

Six days after the first post appeared, Whitney Drake from Ford Communications clarified things: “[This] is essentially a misunderstanding... Ford has no problem with Mustang or other car owners taking pictures of their vehicles for use in club materials like calendars…The Black Mustang Club, and any other Ford enthusiast club, are free to take pictures of their own vehicles for use in calendars or other materials as long as they don't use Ford trademarks in products that will be sold.”  (http://www.bmcforums.com/showpost.php?p=1339241&postcount=1)

So the problem went away, mostly.  But there are several good lessons to learn here from a CRM perspective.

1. Misunderstandings don’t save you from bad press.  The fact that it took six days for Whitney to respond gave time for the problem to fester.  (And this was before Twitter made things like this spread even faster.) 
 
2. Anyone can be an influencer - this started as a posting on a fairly obscure enthusiast car forum, but what damage did it do to Ford’s reputation?
 
3. “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” (from Shakespeare’s "Julius Cesar") This BMC calendar information is widely available years after the fact, and doing a Google search for Black Mustang Club Calendar produces over 80,000 results, mostly as a result of this dust-up. 
 
4. Wow, there is such a thing as a Black Mustang Club.  Is there an enthusiast group for our products that maybe we can encourage?