Ten Years Later eMusic.com Crushes Its Brand Values in One Day – The Perils of Not Having a Community Manager
June 4th, 2009 by Dave Allen
After the Dominos Pizza fiasco you would think that companies would have jumped at the opportunity to protect their brand values online. If executives at your company baulk at hiring a Community Manager you should point out to them that the salary involved in the position should be considered an insurance premium. Community Manager is a full time 24/7 job – scraping the web for all mentions of your company brand and putting out fires where they flare up, and applying praise and support to those who evangelize your brand.
Case study: [Transparency - In 1999 I was GM at eMusic.com]
On June 1st eMusic.com, an online independent music subscription company that offers passionate music fans a smorgasbord of offerings from some of the best independent music labels in the world for a monthly subscription fee, sent out a press release announcing that it had acquired the rights to the BMG/Sony Music back catalog. With that news came a shock for those passionate music loving customers of eMusic – there would be a substantial rate hike for the service. Whether those two statements were meant to be announced simultaneously or not, and and even if it was coincidental, the results were fascinating. The web lit up with thousands of comments from angry eMusic subscribers and influential bloggers picked up the story and ran with it.
Here’s a few links:
eMusic’s web site with message and 800+ comments.
The Phoenix New Times newspaper – headline Sony Ruins eMusic’s Indie Credibility, Raises Rates
HypeBot – eMusic Readers React to Sony Addition
Swindleeeee leaves a post
Updated to include new eMusic response.
Today is currently day 4 of eMusic taking the heat online and their response has been lukewarm. Their blog has 800+ comments and most of them are not pleasant to read should you work there. The main response so far is from Danny Stein, eMusic CEO and Chairman, who wrote what can only be described as a puff piece here. A great Community Manager would have advised the executives on how to handle the story, instead the CEO started a forest fire that is now burning fiercely.
What eMusic should have done:
1) They should have hired a Community Manager to be in charge of their subscriber customer service online
2) They should have polled their customers first, perhaps with a message like this – “We are thinking of acquiring the Sony Music back catalog and in doing so this will cause a significant hike to our fee structure. Would you enjoy access to Sony Music catalog at a higher price? Or would you prefer a two-tiered pricing system where you can choose to not have access to major label catalogs? Please let us know.”
3) They ought to have responded to the first outburst of negativity quickly and concisely.
4) They should have listened to what their customers were saying and reacted to that story rather than defending the Sony Music deal.
eMusic is a great music service with passionate subscribers and I sincerely hope that they recover quickly from this fiasco and continue to serve their customers well. They should also hire a Community Manager – it works well for Comcast for instance – see below.
Tags: Comcast, community manager, customer service, emusic, Fiasco, NemoHQ, social media, Social Web, sony
June 4th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Thanks for linking to my post on eMusic and Sony. With respect to your comments about handing this situation, I tried my hand at creating a hypothetical letter from eMusic to its subscribers: http://swindleeeee.com/2009/06/03/the-letter-danny-stein-didnt-write/
June 4th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
You make an excellent point: “if executives at your company baulk at hiring a Community Manager you should point out to them that the salary involved in the position should be considered an insurance premium.”
Truly astounding after the #motrimmoms, #amazonfail and even the “Mad Men twittergate” debacles. Not only do big brands need community managers, but those folks ought to be trained in crisis management — which has typically been the domain of PR pros. After all these highly publicized corporate mistakes, every communications department should have been scrambling to re-calibrate their online approach. And if they’re not, their agencies and marketing firms should be counseling them to do so. That is, if they care about the health of their clients’ brands.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I believe strongly that the best thing that eMusic can now do is have their CEO on to YouTube to apologize for this mess directly to the subscribers, and then ask them honestly and openly what they would like to see eMusic do to make up for this fiasco. The subscribers are the lifeblood of this company and should be treated with respect. Nothing less will do.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
[...] 2: Great post on the whole situation from the former GM at eMusic here at social-cache.com. This entry was posted in Business Moves and tagged censorship, comments, customer service, [...]
June 4th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
One would think web services would be savvy communicators, but emusic, delightful service that it has been, has been terrible about communication for some time, and they’re not alone. Why?
I agree with the original post’s suggetsion of what they should have done, and with Dave Allen about what they should do.
Sheesh!
June 7th, 2009 at 10:06 am
I second what Dave Allen recommends. “The subscribers are the lifeblood of this company and should be treated with respect. Nothing less will do.” Well said.
I have complained on 17 dots at the original letter, in a letter to eMusic (which was responded to via a form letter that simply defended their original position), on my own blog, and in comments to several other blogs. I see many others doing the same and I can only hope that our voices will be heard.
June 9th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
[...] not that mad. but it appears others are, including former manager Dave Allen, who maintains that the service has signed its own death warrant with the recent changes. he mentions it again in a separate post where he refers to the eMusic “fiasco.” and [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 2:27 am
The title may not be “community manager”, but eMusic *does* have someone who is supposed to be in charge of managing consumer public relations (presumably that includes their customers, the most important ‘consumers’ they deal with), and social media presence: (from http://www.emusic.com/about/executive.html )
“Cathy Halgas Nevins
Vice President, Corporate Communications
Cathy Halgas Nevins brings an unusual combination of experience with independent labels and artists, digital music and e-commerce to her role at eMusic. She manages all corporate communications, consumer public relations and social media presences for eMusic … ”
[Note: The next paragraph is a little long winded with the references, but it is to make a point.]
The problem is that she is just really, really bad at it. For instance, after someone noticed the removal of comments posted to the epic 1200+ complaints log on 17dots (comments that many people had read) that contained the twitter tag #emusicfail, and the subsequent coverage of it at techdirt.com and other places, she contacted a few of those blogs and said that it was not true (“Absolutely not, that is not something we would do”), and that it was “technologically impossible” for comments on their blog to be renumbered (see http://chrisyount.com/?p=44 , “Update 1″ as well as the very first comment, from Cathy Nevins). She also posted much the same thing in the 17dot comments as CathyHN and identified herself as with emusic ( http://17dots.com/2009/05/31/more-of-the-good-stuff/#comment-95189 ). The only problem was that it was not true. They did remove comments after they had already been posted and seen by viewers, people noticed ( http://17dots.com/2009/05/31/more-of-the-good-stuff/#comment-95239 ), and then someone detailed a convincing log ( http://17dots.com/2009/05/31/more-of-the-good-stuff/#comment-95378 ) of places in the comments where posts were referenced by number and where that number was now lower. To clinch it, someone noticed that the number of comments listed at the top of the comments was 13 (or more now) higher than the actual number of comments, indicating at least that many comments may have been removed.
So she did attempt to try to do damage control after the censorship was first publicized, but by spreading something that turned out to be untrue, she only managed to destroy her credibility and make emusic look even more disingenuous than it already did with the CEO’s “isn’t this great!” blog post.
She hasn’t been heard from at all in the comments after being called to task for, ummmm, “stretching the truth”, or AFAIK in the emusic forums or on external blogs. I don’t believe anyone has responded at all after the blogs and articles regarding the censorship spread (and re-spread through syndication) around the web.
Basically, another monster mis-handling of of a monstrous mis-handling (removing posts containing #emusicfail twitter hash tags in the first place) that left their purported PR/communications manager essentially self-crippled.
So maybe the point is that they need a *good* community manager who makes really really certain that statements she makes to the public in the midst of a mondo-crisis are true before issuing them. As it stands now, they are completely mute and continuing to let all the anger fester, and it has been 10 days.