UPDATE: Today, January 14, Etsy has announced policy changes that were sparked by the protest outlined in the post below. These changes prohibit the offending products. The post notes that the “intense debate” online led to the review of the policies and subsequent changes.

UPDATE: CNN Headline News has covered the tale of the cards for sale on Etsy.

UPDATE: Per Jonathan Mast, Etsy continues to respond to complaints with a canned reply. There’s now a petition with nearly 15,000 signatures asking Etsy to remove the cards.

A company-wide culture that embraces the customer experience, and community managers who reflect the culture, are the proper foundation for engaging customers through social channels.  Too many companies have plunged into the social media waters without adjusting their cultures to support the customer experience. Opting to view customer engagement as a program, left in the hands of one or two staffers or a lone department, can lead to communities gone wild at worst (think Nestle) or disaffected customers at best.
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This is the tale of a company that created some disaffected customers, along with consumers who will never become customers. The company essentially shut down attempts by a community to engage through the very social media channels the company had established, including Twitter, Facebook and a blog. It’s a case study of what can happen when companies open these channels but foresake the culture.

I learned of the experience when episode 579 of For Immediate Release, the podcast I co-host with Neville Hobson. (You can listen to the audio comment at the end of this post.)

Jonathan, the father of a child with Down syndrome

child, follows related Twitter lists and hashtags, including #Downsyndrome, where he saw a growing number of tweets objecting to greeting cards that were available at Etsy, an online consignment store for people who make and sell crafts. One of the cards features a prominent sterotypical illustration of a young man with Down syndrome victim

saying, “I can count to potato.” The greeting: “Congratulations. Your kid has Down sefyndrome.”

It’s just one of several offensive cards, some on the Down theme (“Parents of Kids with Down syndrome are Assholes,” for example), others poking fun at breast cancer, rape, and molestation. Jonathan dug around Etsy’s website and found that its policy rejects products that are hate-based or gender-biased. On the basis of that policy, Jonathan began retweeting some of the messages he’d seen and asked his followers to complain to Etsy. He offered his own views on Etsy’s Facebook page, where he and others asked for the cards to be removed.

“Keep in mind that I live in this (social media) world, so I tried to take a strong but not flame approach, even though my personal feelings were hot,” Jonathan told me in an email. “They proceeded to delete mine and others who started joining in.” Jonathan sought an explanation, which came much later in the form of a post to the wall:

Etsy essentially said, “Yes, we have a place for your to engage with us, but we want it to be a happy place, so if you have anything that doesn’t make it look like everybody is 100% delighted with us 100% of the time, please send us an email and we’ll get back to you, but you can’t post it here.”

Alison Buckley, a communications professional who saw Jonathan’s tweet and joined in the effort to have the cards removed, told me in an email that “Rather than responding in a professional manner, the company decided to instead, take the comments completely off their Facebook page. this made their followers more upset and encouraged more negative commenting on their page.”

There is no reference on the Facebook page to any policy regarding “negativity.”

Many of the responses to the post were from loyal Etsy customers who supported the company and chided the protesters—the kind of reaction most companies hope for when they build strong relationships with customers. Plenty of comments, though, took issue with the products and Etsy’s response.

Of course, Etsy isn’t the first company to argue, “We need to get complaints off Twitter and Facebook and channel them through the email account or 800 number that we set up just for that purpose.” It’s a common lament.

Whether those compalining about the products were justified in their response or over-sensitive and ultra-politically correct is beside the point. The company’s response is the issue, and it stands as evidence that Etsy has not embraced a customer-centric culture.

Customer-centric companies recognize that one inescapable consequence of the rise of social media is that the customer, not the company, chooses where to engage. If I communicate mostly through Twitter, and the company has a Twitter account, that’s where I’ll direct my question or problem. If I spend most of my time on Facebook, and the company has a Facebook page, that’s how I’ll reach out. When companies are prepared to serve customers wherever they encounter them with community managers equipped to address the issues that arise, the rest of the community can witness fist-hand the company’s service culture.

Alison Buckley agrees:

With the large fan base Etsy has on Facebook, they have an opportunity to really engage in conversations with their customers. However…the way they used the site in this situation probably hurt their reputation more than if they were to use Facebook to listen and respond in a more appropriate and professional manner.

With the use of social channels increasing daily, it’s becoming more and more important for brands to assess each situation and understand how one response can significantly benefit or hurt a reputation.

Jonathan also commented on an Etsy blog post that featured a video drawing attention to the consequences of bullying. That comment was also removed, although Jonathan concedes that the blog’s policy forbids comments that call out a vendor by name. Jonathan complied with Etsy’s procedures by sending an email, which generated an autoresponse promising to look into the matter. He never heard anything more in response to his email, although repeated checking of the site revealed that the offending items were eventually removed. Oddly, those same items were back a day later and are still accessible as I write this post.

Etsy’s handling of offended customers also calls into question the company’s sincerity. In its response to comments left to the blog, a company representative wrote that Etsy takes offensive material seriously, adding, “If you see any offensive material on here, please let us know,” adding that comments are welcome.

“If that’s the case,” Jonathan asked in a follow-up comment, “why is every single post related to this person gone? There have been multiple posts that I have personally viewed…and they have all been deleted…The way Etsy is responding to this issue is leaving a lot of your customers feeling as though their thoughts and feelings do not matter.”

That comment was deleted, too.

In the early days of social media, companies routinely worried, “If we allow comments on a blog, somebody might say something bad about us.” Some companies, like Etsy, seem to have answered, “No problem, we’ll just delete ‘em.” All that accomplishes, however, is to motivate the aggrieved parties to seek take their issues elsewhere, where the company’s behavior will be exposed to a whole new audience, and where the company has no power to remove comments. Jeffrey Pomranka, who works in the disability field and got involved in the protest by retweeting and commenting on a friend’s Facebook update, told me via email:

The biggest impact is how quickly information can travel around the social networking sites. It is really no surprise because it happens every day, but I still get a kick out of learning about something that I can be a small part of, from people I have met maybe once or not at all in person. I believe I have met Jonathan once at a conference, but i can’t say that I would be able to pick him out of a lineup. I do, however, get good information from him via twitter. The same can be said for a number of my Twitter and Facebook friends.”

The choice for companies becomes clearer all the time: Be prepared to address customer complaints and problems wherever they surface and grow your reputation as an organization that values the customer experience, or blunt those messages and watch the issue spread beyond your ability to manage it.

Two great posts have examined critical dimensions of customer experience; I highly recommend them both. Writing for UX Magazine, Cynthia Thomas argues that an experience culture can be designed, a view I endorse having been involved in several culture change initiatives. The criteria and process for selecting a Facebook community manager is the theme of a Social Media Examiner post by Amy Porterfield.

Both posts should be required reading for the folks at Etsy, and all the other companies in the same boat.

Here’s Jonathan’s audio comment to FIR: