Did Apple learn nothing from Whole Foods?
The high-end purveyor of beets and quinoa found itself in the midst of controversy last August over a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by CEO John Mackey. The article was bad P.R. to begin with, but what happened next really brought out the badvocates.
Whole Foods deleted from its forums all threads that criticized Mackey for the piece.
Well, yesterday Consumer Reports said it can’t recommend Apple’s new iPhone 4 because of reception problems. (Oddly, despite their nonrecommendation, those storied reviewers of consumable goods still named iPhone 4 to the top of their smart phone rating chart.)
The Internet was abuzz as it naturally is any time Steve Jobs sneezes. Some of that buzz had the gall to spill into Apple’s own forums. So how did Apple respond?
By quashing the complaints, according to TUAW. (Update: TUAW is now pointing to a Wired post that shows some threads that haven’t been deleted.)
Ouch.
Cardinal rule of providing your fans with a place to chat: you have to take the good with the bad if you want to maintain any air of authenticity.
But then maybe Apple knows something I don’t. After all, a simple search for “whole foods forums” just now didn’t surface any stories about the grocer’s misstep. Apparently the search engines have forgiven all.