Ten Years Later eMusic.com Crushes Its Brand Values in One Day – The Perils of Not Having a Community Manager
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
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.
