I Hate Starbucks
Filed under: Reputation Management on Monday, October 13th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine
Actually I don’t, heck I don’t even drink coffee (a fact which has caused a few heads to be shaken in disbelief around the office), but someone does hate Starbucks enough create an “I Hate Starbucks” site and get it ranked 8th for the term “Starbucks”. To be honest, it’s not a very engaging site, and owner has some links on there that I’d say are not too relevant (unless you believe that Mesothelioma has something to do with coffee, in which case I’m even more thrilled that I don’t touch the stuff), which strikes me as being a little shady, but maybe that’s the only way the owner can fund the hosting fees for the site.
So why was I taking a look at Starbucks in the first place? Well, I read in a UK newspaper an expose about the Starbucks corporate wide practice of leaving a tap running all day long for ‘hygiene reasons’. Worldwide this meant that 23 million liters (or over 6 million gallons) of water were being wasted every day. That’s a staggering amount of wastage, especially for a company that has sells a product that’s supposed to work towards getting clean water for children around the world (as a side-note, Flash? Really, a site comprised solely of Flash, and slow loading Flash at that? Ugh).
So what happened? Well, by the next morning Starbucks had issued a statement that they were looking into alternatives, but they had yet to remove the edict (individual stores in the UK took it upon themselves to do so).
The fact that this issue was raised in the top selling newspaper in the UK meant that Starbucks were very quickly made aware of this issue (in fact, I’ve no doubt that a reporter from the Sun was on the phone to Starbucks UK looking for the follow up story before that issue hit the stands. But what if this issue had been raised on a small site such as “I Hate Starbucks”? Would anyone from Starbucks have noticed? Maybe they would have, since it is ranking for their name, but even so, it’s doubtful that there would have been a statement sent out the next morning. But what if a forum or three picked up the story, or maybe someone from TreeHugger.com saw it, and wrote about it, spreading the word near and far? Would they know then? Would they know when to act? Where to respond? Who to talk to?
If you have to think about these issues, it means that you likely don’t have a robust Buzz Monitoring solution in place. That’s something we can help you with, whether it’s doing an initial, historical scan, or whether it’s continual monitoring, we can show you what’s being said about your company, your brands, your products, your industry, and your people. Not everything said about you will be in a major newspaper, and you’ll need to know about any issues, good or bad, before you know how and where to respond.
