The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a Chicago landlord that filed suit against a tenant for tweeting one evening about her moldy apartment.

Horizon Reality claims that the tenant’s post, “who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks its okay” was “maliciously and wrongfully published” and the tenant allowed “the tweet to be spread throughout the world.”

What’s humorous is that this particular woman only had about 20 followers on Twitter. The Chicago Tribune’s website, in comparison, has over 3 millions impressions per day. What’s more, once the news of the lawsuit spread, the topic became number three on Twitter’s trending topics list and the story made it to the front page of Digg.com.

We can mock this company all we want, but this is a good reminder as to how powerful social media can be. In what became known as the “Streisand Effect”, Barbra Streisand filed a lawsuit against a photographer who refused to remove her home from an aerial shot of the California coastline. The photograph was one in a series of a publicly available collection of various California coastlines, which was taken as part of the California Coastal Records Project. As a result of the lawsuit, enormous public attention was drawn to the conflict resulting in more than 420,000 online views of the photograph and Streisand’s home.

The Streisand Effect was thereafter used to describe how an attempt to censor or remove user-generated input on the Internet can hugely backfire, resulting in increased coverage and attention to the information that would otherwise have gone much more unnoticed. A perfect example? Horizon Reality is now listed as an example of the Streisand Effect on Wikipedia.

Other than the obvious lesson to choose your battles wisely when it comes to tampering with consumer-generated online content, it also proves to be a good reminder as to how powerful social media can be.  Instead of filing suit against the tenant which only generated more negative attention and press,  Horizon Reality could have instead used social media to its advantage in the situation. For example, they could have responded to the tenant’s tweet, apologizing for the frustration and re-stating the company’s commitment to its customers and upkeep of its properties.  Had this been done, the only attention the issue would have likely received was from other Horizon Reality customers who saw the company’s apologetic and timely Tweet responding to a customer concern.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.