When you take on social media as part of your marketing efforts you are attempting to connect with your customers, and potential customers. Once you make that social media connection people may respond to you, often in way's you didn't expect.
Earl May Nursery & Garden Center is having a lesson in how social media works. As you may have read here yesterday Earl May Nursery recently banned cats from it premisses. The cat's which had been at the nursery for awhile performing the job of rodent control and customer greeters we're fired recently. The human employee who worked there complained and started a campaign to get the cats back. He was then fired.
Now Earl May's Facebook Page has turned negative as customers, and maybe ex-customers vent. One commenter say's, "It's just plain wrong what you did to the employee who defended the cats. I will make sure all of my friends and family learn of this and never spend another dollar in your stores." Ouch!
This will be a great lesson for those of you involved in, or thinking about becoming involved in social media. Just remember, you social media efforts will reflect your companies ethos, good or bad. There might be good reasons why Earl May fired the cats, as one commenter at this blog points out. The problem is the damage was done. What's worse? Cats apparently have Facebook pages now, and they are not happy. "The cats out of the bag", so to speak.