October 30th, 2009

MoveOn blasts US Chamber Facebook page

Just before noon EST, today, I received a remarkable email from MoveOn.org as one of its millions of email subscribers.

The email revealed an existing story about the  US Chamber of Commerce’s (USCC) either very misleading, or completely false, membership and representation numbers.  The USCC has apparently, for a long while, mislead the public into thinking it had 3 million members, when its actual paid membership is something in the order of 10% or less of that number.

The MoveOne email then asked recipients to post a comment on the USCC’s Facebook page, calling it out on its lies. I reviewed the post, then went to the USCC’s Facebook page to participate. It was already inundated with a phenomenal volume of negative feedback.

The Chamber became flustered as evidenced by its responses to the comments and remained defensive, rather than owning up to its deception or apologizing for any confusion. It had its page settings initially set so that visitors would see its fan’s comments; but anyone can become a fan to comment and that’s what the MoveOn crowd did — the Chamber subsequently set its page to automatically show only its own comments within two hours after the onslaught started.

This was something to watch in action and shows the power of combing email and social media to vastly increase the audience from a traditional media story. There is simply nowhere for opaque organizations to hide; those that try, and then especially those that get defensive about it, will loose oodles of brand value, not to mention stakeholders leaving for the exits.  Anyone know exactly how many of the Chamber’s actual members are still left?