Crisis Type: 1

Towards the end of 2008 – in December when Ford’s ford was preparing to appear before some Congressional committees in US, Ford had to deal with a major social media crisis.

Jim Oakes the administrator for a popular fan site “The Ranger Station” (TRS)  posted on the group’s message boards saying that TRS is being attacked by the Ford Motor Company. Within two minutes the first response came in. Over the course of the day, 916 more posts flooded that thread, with all sorts of angry responses to the big bad Ford Motor Company who was obviously picking on a loyal 10-year old fan site.

As a direct result of Jim Oakes’s call-to-action in his original post, Ford’s customer support took the full brunt of over 1000 email messages that poured into
awaiting inboxes.

22 hours and 26 minutes later, Jim Oakes posted Our (my) Agreement With Ford (remedy) to announce the resolution (thanks to Scott Monty)

It turns out there was much more to the story. The owner was selling counterfeit Ford goods, and together, Ford reached a reasonable solution to the situation.

Ron Ploof, a B-to-B social media consultant, has created a completely masterpiece case study of what happened at Ford. Have a look at it below:

The Ranger Station Fire

Happy reading

M