You didn’t have to be one of the people who queued for the iPhone 4 to see the hype backfire spectacularly.
Within hours of the device going on sale, Twitter was alight with comments about yellow spots appearing on the screen and a much more serious issue – the fact that holding the phone in your left hand seemed to block the signal to the integrated antenna. I’m monitoring Twitter http://twitter.com/search?q=iphone%204 as I write this, and the comments are coming in at the rate of about 5,000 every 10 seconds. Not all are about the problems people have encountered, but the majority are. Buyers were also quick off the mark in posting videos of the problem on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmVpoccPnc&feature=related. Perhaps the most damaging commentary appeared on the Computerworld blog http://blogs.computerworld.com/16403/iphone_4_early_adopters_just_beta_testers_for_apple.
All this activity soon turned it into a mainstream news story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8759590.stm. It even got the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg into trouble, after he forgot the power of his own site. www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/06/facebook-ceo-deletes-controversial-iphone-4-post.html.
But you don’t have to launch the most eagerly awaited phone of the year to find your products or your reputation under attack. And as one blogger says, the web never forgets. You might as well carve the criticism in stone.
What if there happened to be a way of monitoring and responding to such negativity? There is. It’s called gem. And it’s one click away.