This is one of those blog posts I’m almost scared to write, for fear of being sued.
Long story short – Amanda Bonnen has a Twitter account. She’s hardly an active user… she’s got about 30 followers. In Twitterverse, this makes her so small as to be insignificant. She tweeted “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”
That got her sued by Horizon Realty – for $50,000.
I don’t even know where to start with the absolute insanity of this. I’ll leave the whole ‘they’re right to sue/they’re stupid to sue’ argument off of the table for now. Let’s just examine the communications here.
Either a) Horizon had mold, and had an upset customer, or b) Horizon didn’t have mold, but a customer was trying to claim they did. One would assume that the reason for her tweet was simply to vent – after all, with so few followers it’s not like she has a large public following.
Horizon has to be naturally worried about statements like this driving people away from their properties. That makes sense.
So what’s a prudent course of action here? Did they call her and ask how to make her a happy customer? No. Did they investigate her complaint to determine whether or not there was any veracity to her claims? No. Did they send her a nasty letter written in crayon, complaining because she wasn’t playing nice? No.
They sued her for $50,000. My favourite line of the whole story is “Bonnen wasn’t contacted before the suit was filed or asked to remove the Tweet, (Horizon Realty’s Jeffrey Michael) said: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”
So here’s my sole point – in terms of communications, you can’t buy this type of publicity. Nor would you want to – with coverage across North America, I would suggest that the “good name” of Horizon Realty is going to require a much more vigorous defence after today than before. In short – it was a collosal, enormous blunder.
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If anyone from Horizon cares to respond, I’m more than happy to print their response verbatim. It beats getting sued. Although I’d like to point out that a) I’m in Canada, where if you sue me and lose, you have to pay my court costs and b) as a sole entrepeneur, I doubt you could find enough worth suing over anyway.
July 28, 2009
Isn’t the first rule of litigation to never, ever sue “poor” people? It would have been in-line with Horizon’s ethos to have launched a suit against Twitter for providing a vehicle from which people could lay baseless allegations against their business, and that Twitter failed to include a suitable warning message prominently displayed on their site that tweets could result in legal defamation claims.