Amazon Restores Books To Quell Twitter Rage

If there is a central lesson for company executives, government leaders, and publishers as to how to protect your brand image in the age of interactive media, it is this: Know that you will be held accountable for your actions.

Even as Twitter execs fight off charges that the micro-blogging service is being corrupted by the likes of Magpie, and its product-insertion (pay-per-tweet) campaigns, Twitter’s user base is being hailed as the hero in a reversal by Amazon in its much larger and more problematic censorship scandal.

Amazon stated late Monday that “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” — not an explicit policy change — was the reason thousands of books lost their sales rankings on the site and became much harder to find in searches.

Amazon’s retreat came after two days of outrage erupted on Twitter, where Tweeters denounced what appeared to be a systematic attempt to suppress gay and lesbian writings. Among the books that lost their rankings over the weekend were lost their sales rankings during the weekend included James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” the gay romance novel “Transgressions” and “Unfriendly Fire,” an examination of governmental policy on gays in the military.

By Monday afternoon, over 18,000 people had signed a petition ciruclating via Twitter to boycott Amazon over the scandal. The online retail discounter then moved to quell the rage by making its announcement (to the AP), saying that rankings and searchability for the affected volumes were being restored.

While there are plenty of morals to this story, what is really making everybody sit up and take notice is how fast users can mobilize themselves in protest via Twitter. As we’ve been noting here for the past week, Twitter is growing at an exponential pace, so much so that from out of nowhere a year ago, it has eclipsed The New York Times in traffic this month, and is projected to pass CNN.com (which is roughly twice as big as NYTImes.com) next month, by which time Twitter should be among the Top 20 Websites in the U.S.

And this is only standard web-based traffic, mind you, while Twitter’s main base is among mobile users. The Times and CNN, among others, are trailing badly in developing an effective mobile strategy. They would be well-advised to try to partner up with Twitter — today.

For additional coverage of the censorship scandal, see Erik Sherman’s analysis of why Amazon’s claim this happened by “error” doesn’t fly.