Matt Trevenar, a patron of the Academy nightclub in Civic, posted on the club’s Facebook page that he had lost his wallet last night, explaining he’d made several attempts to contact the club to retrieve it to no avail.
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His post then received more than 1600 'likes', as well as hundreds of comments from other customers joining in to vent their vitriol towards the club.
The Canberra Times spoke to owner and manager of Academy, Ryan Phillips, who said the patron didn’t actually contact the club.
“He had the wrong number and actually hadn’t sent us an email… we have since spoken to him and are doing the best we can to find his wallet,” Mr Phillips said.
Mr Phillips was not overly concerned about the post, believing that a lot of the anger that Mr Trevenar displayed towards the business was purely because he had lost something important to him.
“In a case like this often the person is just upset that they have gone out for a night out and lost a phone or a wallet rather than at the business itself,” he said.
Academy is just one in a long list of businesses that have experienced consumer backlash via social media.
Just last week Channel Seven in Sydney experienced thousand of complaints, about their treatment of a family who had just lost their child in a quad biking accident on the south coast of NSW.
University of Canberra social media expert Lubna Alam says that businesses today can’t avoid social media.
“Because of the changing perspective and the way that we now share information businesses have no choice but to engage in social media,” she said.
“You need a policy… businesses need to respond quickly, they need to engage with their customers.”
Academy attempted to engage with Mr Trevenar by asking that he contact them privately.
However it appears that when the comments got out of hand, the post was removed.
When the Canberra Times went looking for the post this morning, it could not be found.
Mr Phillips denies that any members of his staff removed the post.
“No member of our staff removed the post, I believe that it is just hidden,” he said.
Mr Phillips explained that he is happy for the post to stay up on their page.
“I am happy for it to stay up there if there’s a customer that is disappointed in some way Facebook is a good forum for them to let us know about it,” he said.
When contacted by The Canberra Times today, Mr Trevenar said while he was very unimpressed with the initial incident, Academy had been helpful since his Facebook post yesterday.
“It worked straight away – it’s that easy I don’t know why other people won’t do that in the future,” Mr Trevenar said.
Ms Alam has offered some advice to businesses, when dealing with social media backlash.
“Address the issue as soon as possible and then assess what steps need to be taken to quickly rectify the situation,” she said.
“I wouldn’t recommend removing the post.
“It’s hard for businesses to do these things, you can only engage and try and win back the support of your customers if something like this happens.”
