Social Media Crisis in the Global Age: Lessons from the Siemens "Refrigerator Gate" in China

Abstract

In September 2011, a Chinese blogger, Luo Yonghao, posted a complaint on Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) about a Siemens refrigerator door being difficult to close. Siemens underestimated the groundswell a single “tweet” could generate and failed to respond. This quickly evolved into a reputational
nightmare for Siemens, a crisis later known as the Siemens “Refrigerator Gate” in China. The problem seemed to be small at first, as it was one customer and one microblog post. However, Siemens’ failure to properly address the problem turned this seemingly small problem into a large crisis across the nation.

Globally, social media have flipped the power balance between organizations and consumers. With online social networks, users can exert influence to virally affect organizational decisions (Li & Stacks, 2014). Social media users are highly aware of their influence over others online and the collective power that they may exert over companies. With quicker access to information, unconstrained communication, and global connectivity, the networked population is building stronger rapport and taking collective actions to demand social change (Li, 2016). This empowered action by a few can easily (and rapidly) spread to the larger population, thus triggering crisis situations.