By Oliver Fischer
I really like those old proverbs, quotes and sayings. Everyone can recite them, and though they are rarely useful, they at least make you appear quite intellectual. And polite. For example, ‘Speech is silver, but silence is golden,’ is just a nice way to tell someone to shut up.
This good old proverb comes to my mind quite often these days as more and more people publish their opinions online. A prime example is Wolfgang Grupp, the owner of the German textile manufacturing company Trigema, who was interviewed for a German blog just last week. Mr Grupp is well known for his straight talking and, true to form, he just said what he thought about the internet and particularly the users of a well known social media platform.
I quote: ‘Twitter ist für mich einfach nur dumm und die Menschen, die das nutzen, sind für mich Idioten.’ (‘In my opinion, Twitter is just stupid and the people using it are idiots.’)
Needless to say, as soon as the interview was published, an online discussion erupted, as people debated whether he’d been misquoted, if he was just misunderstood or if he just didn’t care. His words were quoted in several other blogs, retweeted more than 700 times and an argument raged on Trigema’s Facebook site, as people tried to decide whether the company – which has a speaking chimpanzee in its TV adverts (and as its avatar on Twitter) – was unkind or courageous.
To its credit, Trigema’s crisis management team acted fast and used appropriate channels, responding via Twitter and on Facebook. It also set up a discussion between Mr. Grupp, the blogger who wrote the interview, and some prominent online community members on web radio station, cliq.fm. Essentially, it used the very platforms that, just a day before, were being exploited to slate Trigema’s reputation.
We can only guess about what would have happened if Trigema had tried to ignore the problem. Worse still, it could have decided to take legal action against the blog (see here, here, here and here for just some examples).
Trigema and others would perhaps do well to always remember another very true (although slightly readjusted) proverb: ‘bad news will fly around the whole world while your apology is getting its boots on.’
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