Bloggasm

A year ago, a Richmond woman named Sapna purchased a stackable washer and dryer and a five-year warranty for them from Sears. In October, she came home to puddles on her floor because of a leaky washer. She then attempted to get Sears to make good on their warranty to fix the washer, and as you’ll see in full detail if you follow my link below, Sears proceeded to screw her over whole-heartedly and with little remorse.

Only there’s one thing Sears wasn’t counting on. Unfortunately for them, Sapna happens to be dating a professional news journalist who happens to know the power of bad publicity and how to stir it up; that is, she’s dating me.

After about the fourth screw-up, I decided to take action. I went to my computer and wrote an email to the editors at Consumerist. For those who don’t know, Consumerist is a Gawker-owned blog that averages over 200,000 readers a day. I summarized Sapna’s dilemma and asked if they’d be interested in investigating it. An intern wrote back that same day and said she’d like to hear more, so I had Sapna write up a detailed narrative of every which way Sears had screwed her over.

After sending the email to Consumerist, it wasn’t long before they posted it on the site.

Just think about it: The Sears customer service thought that they were dealing with a single irate customer. But because of the age of Web 2.0, when the person you’re pissing off on the other line could well be a blogger with thousands of daily readers, consumer trends are changing. If this had happened 10 years ago, Sapna would have been forced to deal with the problem and then rant and rave to close friends and relatives. There would have been bad word-of-mouth (which is never good for a business), but it would have been limited to a few people. Now, not only do the readers of this blog know about Sears’ bad customer service, but so do 200,000+ readers at Consumerist.

The playing field, as they say, has been leveled.

UPDATE: Frequent reader Stephen Ward gives his own account about when he was screwed over by a company. Be sure to read the comments in his post from people who were turned away from the company after finding his post via google:

Small businesses should be especially wary in this day and age. My wife and I had an issue with a home assembly company named Tiny Details. My negative post about them now ranks #5 in Google for their brand name. Just from commenters, I know I’ve cost them a lot of business. How’s that for negative PR?

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Related posts:
1. Digg ditches Google ads in favor of Microsoft
2. Wired editor bans email addresses from PR companies

I’m a newspaper journalist by day, and I usually get dozens of irrelevant press releases that are of no interest to me. My Bloggasm email address also gets hit with several press releases a week from PR people who never bothered reading my site. But I’m usually reluctant to add these emails to my spam folder because of some irrational worry that one of these days one of these PR people will send me something relevant.

Well, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, probably gets many more press releases than I do, and he’s fed up. Every time he receives a press release that he finds irrelevant, he automatically adds the sender’s email address to a blocked blacklist. Apparently this has launched a shit storm among PR companies.