It's not often that a 20-year-old children's book helps to trigger an e-retail revolt, but that's exactly what happened over the weekend.
On the very same day that gay and lesbian parents and their kids were invited to an Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, a classic children's storybook about a family with two mommies ended up at the heart of an online revolt against online retail giant Amazon.com.
When word got out that children's books like Heather Has Two Mommies and parenting/self-help guides like The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth and a guide to preventing suicide in gay youth had been removed from Amazon.com search while anti-gay books like A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality were benefitting from a boost in visibility, people started tweeting (sending online messages via Twitter) and tagging those messages with #amazonfail. (This is a gross oversimplification, of course. These posts at The Seattle Intelligencer provide a great summary. And if you want a healthy dose of outrage -- with a bit of spicy language, be forewarned! -- you must read Jezebel.)
Within a matter of hours, #amazonfail had become the top-trending topic on Twitter. Tens of thousands of Twitter users contributed to the discussion, determining which titles were or weren't available for sale on the site and posting links to off-site blog posts responding to developments related to #amazonfail.
As Amazon.com spokesperson Drew Herdener ultimately explained via a statement published on the blog of Seattle Intelligencer reporter Andrea James, 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica were affected at Amazon.com sites world-wide. "It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search."
The books affected were not all gay and lesbian-themed, but a significant number were -- and inconsistencies in the way Amazon.com was tagging books in the affected categories (as well as inconsistent information provided by members of Amazon.com staff) served to perpetuate this misconception throughout much of Sunday.
It wasn't until late in the day Monday that the company was seen as taking steps to start to do the right thing -- owning up to the extent of the problem (this was no glitch, as the company's PR representatives had claimed on Sunday); and characterizing its own crisis response as "ham-fisted."
By this point, #amazonfail had come to represent the company's customer relations failure as much as its systems failure.
Amazon.com still doesn't seem to grasp that there is a lot more bridge-building to be done, particularly with authors and customers in the GLBT community. The U.S. advocacy group GLAAD had to reach out to Amazon.com in order to seek reassurance that "any of visibility of gay-themed books as a result of this error will be made right by Amazon.com." Amazon.com did not reach out to provide that reassurance, as it should have.
And, even as I write this, the distress caused to those who thought their lives and experiences were being rendered invisible by strings of code has yet been taken into account.
That is the ultimate #amazonfail
On the very same day that gay and lesbian parents and their kids were invited to an Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, a classic children's storybook about a family with two mommies ended up at the heart of an online revolt against online retail giant Amazon.com.
When word got out that children's books like Heather Has Two Mommies and parenting/self-help guides like The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth and a guide to preventing suicide in gay youth had been removed from Amazon.com search while anti-gay books like A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality were benefitting from a boost in visibility, people started tweeting (sending online messages via Twitter) and tagging those messages with #amazonfail. (This is a gross oversimplification, of course. These posts at The Seattle Intelligencer provide a great summary. And if you want a healthy dose of outrage -- with a bit of spicy language, be forewarned! -- you must read Jezebel.)
Within a matter of hours, #amazonfail had become the top-trending topic on Twitter. Tens of thousands of Twitter users contributed to the discussion, determining which titles were or weren't available for sale on the site and posting links to off-site blog posts responding to developments related to #amazonfail.
As Amazon.com spokesperson Drew Herdener ultimately explained via a statement published on the blog of Seattle Intelligencer reporter Andrea James, 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica were affected at Amazon.com sites world-wide. "It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search."
The books affected were not all gay and lesbian-themed, but a significant number were -- and inconsistencies in the way Amazon.com was tagging books in the affected categories (as well as inconsistent information provided by members of Amazon.com staff) served to perpetuate this misconception throughout much of Sunday.
It wasn't until late in the day Monday that the company was seen as taking steps to start to do the right thing -- owning up to the extent of the problem (this was no glitch, as the company's PR representatives had claimed on Sunday); and characterizing its own crisis response as "ham-fisted."
By this point, #amazonfail had come to represent the company's customer relations failure as much as its systems failure.
Amazon.com still doesn't seem to grasp that there is a lot more bridge-building to be done, particularly with authors and customers in the GLBT community. The U.S. advocacy group GLAAD had to reach out to Amazon.com in order to seek reassurance that "any of visibility of gay-themed books as a result of this error will be made right by Amazon.com." Amazon.com did not reach out to provide that reassurance, as it should have.
And, even as I write this, the distress caused to those who thought their lives and experiences were being rendered invisible by strings of code has yet been taken into account.
That is the ultimate #amazonfail
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