Over on Facebook, 16,000+ people have signed up to support the 'Ice Cold Beer Guy.' Who is that? That's Wayne McMahon, a beer seller at Toronto Blue Jays (baseball) games who has gained a cult following among fans (see YouTube clip above).
The 'Ice Cold Beer Guy' recently got the sack, and the buzz that's been created around him is a textbook example of grass-roots net activisim in practice...and astoundingly bad PR by the company being targeted.
Wayne McMahon got fired because employers Aramark, the company that holds the catering concession at the Blue Jays ground, sent in a mystery shopper to try and catch him out. In Canada the legal drinking age is 19, and you are meant to card anyone who looks under 30. Aramark's mystery shopper (who wasn't asked for ID) was 22.
According to Ofcom (the UK version of the FTC in the US), Canada had a higher rate of social network participation (53% of Internet users), than the UK (39%), the US (34%), Japan (32%) and France (17%).
And Wayne McMahon's former customers haven't been slow to mobilise. His Facebook group now has 16,493 members, complete with a link to the Aramark site so that you can give them "a piece of your mind." 2,200 people have also signed their names over at petition spot.
Meanwhile Daniel Lublin, Wayne McMahon's lawyer, has been posting all about the Aramark case on his website. Not surprisingly, the story has now been picked up by a number of Canadian newspapers, for example here and here.
According to the lawyers, Aramark has completed an investigation, and is not prepared to reinstate the Ice Cold Beer Guy. The result says the Toronto Sun will be a "nice cold lawsuit" for wrongful dismissal.
I get it. A firm holding an alcohol concession at a major sports ground wants to show that it takes a hard line on under age drinking.
But given that Wayne McMahon didn't actually serve anyone under age, his employment record is clean, and (not knowing too much about Canadian drinking laws) 'looking under 30' can I imagine be kind of subjective, I wonder whether Aramark hasn't scored a massive own goal here.
I'm amazed noone high up in the Aramark corporate communications department didn't urge them to use that 'investigation' as a route to some kind of face saving solution (or maybe they did, but weren't listened to). After all, a formal reprimand would still have shown Aramark to be all for responsible drinking.
But no. A company that on its home page boasts about being one of America's most admired companies, has chosen to take on a 62 year old man who (according to the National Post) earns the princely sum of $4000 (£2,000) from selling beer to baseball fans....and whose various fan generated YouTube clips have, by my reckoning got 50,000+ views.
The case of the McLibel two here in the UK shows what can happen when the media gets hold a 'big multinational vs the little guy' kind of story...and that was before the age of social media.
Expect this to run and run in Canada. Even if Aramark ends up winning the case, they've already lost. Meanwhile in a smart move, MTV Live has been quick off the mark in giving Wayne McMahon an announcer spot every day until he gets his old job back.
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2 comments:
This is a great case study in how social networks can create waves of unexpected consequences. The challenge for big organizations/corporations is that the huge networked response may not always be justified ... maybe a company does have a right to fire employees if they don't follow the rules ... but the tsunami that arises against them becomes unstoppable anyway.
In simple terms, the ripple effect of actions has increased greatly. Be careful how you rock the customer boat.
Thanks Ben, someone involved in the case emailed me yesterday to say that had Aramark been a b2c company, things might have been very different by now - the implication being that as a b2b outfit, they hope they can sit it out while it eventually goes away.
If so, I hope not, though the lack of any substantive comment from Aramark reps in the Canadian press does give credence to that theory.
It won't work. At Cow we use the maxim of 'everyone is a consumer.'
While that sounds obvious, a lot of brands don't follow through with it and put an artificial line between "business person" and "consumer."
Of course, a potential corporate customer of Aramark's might be just as influenced, if not more so, by something s/he reads in the paper on the way home or on the weekend, than by some gushing piece in the trade.
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