Apple's Social Media Hell - Why it Needs to Repent
At the recent BlogWorld Expo, I discussed two companies that "get" social media and one that doesn't. The two that get it were Nike and Dell. Nike's excellent community efforts-especially Nike+-and Dell's efforts with forums and blogs …
Context & Ripple Effects
Andy Beal's critique lands in a season when Apple's relationship with its customers was already under scrutiny: back in September 2007, iLounge ran a piece asking whether customers think Apple is going rotten, and in May the New York Times held up Apple's retail-connect playbook as the lesson Sony's stores needed — evidence that the company's community standing was both an asset and, increasingly, a talking point.
At BlogWorld Expo, Beal framed the contrast sharply: Nike's Nike+ community work and Dell's forums-and-blogs operation are what corporate social media should look like, while Apple — despite its fervent user base — stays largely absent from the conversation. That Scobleizer picked the piece up the same day shows how readily Apple's communication gaps become blog fodder.
First-order effects
- Apple's silence in blogs and forums leaves customer complaints — the kind Scobleizer documented around device restart problems — to be aired and amplified by third-party bloggers rather than answered by the company itself.
- Dell and Nike gain a comparative PR advantage: analysts now use their community programs as the explicit benchmark Apple fails.
Second-order effects
- Rivals with active community operations convert Apple's absence into marketing currency, positioning responsiveness itself as a differentiator in consumer electronics.
- Pressure builds on Apple's brand halo: a company whose retail experience was praised as best-in-class earlier in 2007 now risks the narrative that its customer relationships end at the store door.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate blogging and forum engagement shift from optional experiments to expected marketing functions, with laggard brands measured publicly against leaders like Dell's Direct2Dell-style operations.
- Reputation management migrates from press releases to participation: the companies that own the conversation venues increasingly control how product problems are framed.
The trend: Consumer brands are moving from broadcast marketing to participatory community programs, and those that stay silent — even beloved ones like Apple — cede the narrative to bloggers and faster-moving competitors.