Late Sunday night, Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings issued a video apology and statement about his company. This summer, Netflix announced a change to its pricing structure, splitting subscriptions for streaming video from subscriptions for receiving physical DVDs. The result of this drastic change of pricing was an over 50% stock value loss, and the loss of over a million subscribers.
In Sunday’s apology, Hastings announced that the DVD service would be splitting from the streaming service, and that the two would ostensibly become separate companies. There is a lot of analysis occurring throughout the Internet this morning about the decision and why it was made (we particularly like this article).
And social media experts are having a field day talking about Netflix’s large social media blunder.
The new DVD-only company is to be named Qwikster. As soon as the announcement was public, several with Twitter accounts checked out the @Qwikster Twitter feed. It seemed only natural that Netflix–a company that has been a part of the Silicon Valley landscape for many, many years–would correctly leverage their social media presence.
Turns out the Twitter feed that would be the natural go-to name for this nascent company is owned by one Jason Castillo who has tweeted 19 times, and up until last night had under 40 followers (he now has 2000 and climbing). His Twitter avatar is a pot-smoking Elmo cartoon, and most of his crass tweets talk about smoking, women, and being bored in his classes.
This huge blunder certainly provides some entertainment this week, and is probably going to end up costing the new Qwikster a few dollars to purchase the handle from Jason Castillo (many tweets last night encouraged Castillo not to accept the first offer from Netflix, and to contact legal representation), but it is a great reminder that a social media strategy has to be an integral part of any roll-out or major announcement. It made an already difficult Netflix announcement into the Monday-morning laughing stock among the Twitter set.
Gone are the days when it is forgivable to forget to lock down a Twitter handle, or Facebook page before a major announcement. Any public relations strategy should be carefully vetted against all social media channels to avoid the sort of mistake that Netflix/Qwikster made this week.
