On 28 July 2009 a company named Horizon Realty made some big news on Twitter, namely that they were suing a former tenant of one of their apartment buildings for an allegedly libelous tweet. I first noticed this news via one of the people that I follow on Twitter who pointed to a post about it at Mashable: Woman Sued for Tweet:

The Tweet, posted under the now defunct user name @abonnen, was the impetus for the libel lawsuit filed at Cook County Circuit Court, seeking $50,000 in damages. And although the Tweet and username are now deleted, accessing the account via Google ()’s cache shows it has around 20 followers. While the numbers could have dropped since deletion, it doesn’t appear the message would have travelled far. @abonnen wasn’t a particularly heavy Twitter () user, either – she posted somewhere between 1 and 5 tweets per day and often didn’t post for 2 or 3 days.

After this, things started to get out of hand. The massive crowd of early-adopters on Twitter, as always tuned in to anything Twitter-related started to spread the word (of course Mashable has over 1 million followers and nearly 300k blog subscribers…) and by mid-day “Horizon Realty” was a trending topic on Search.Twitter.com.

And other bloggers started talking about it too. In fact, my friend Sonia Simone, writing at Copyblogger has an interesting comment about it:

It’s not about what you think is fair

Horizon Realty might be the most loveable, fair, decent and true company in the world. Right now, their name recognition has about as much appeal as Saddam Hussein. With mold.

Whether fair or not, Horizon has made a worldwide name for itself virtually instantly, connecting its brand with callous disregard for its tenants, or worse.

(Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. This is what it looks like.)

Do social media users read all the facts carefully before flaming? Of course they don’t. Are there dozens of inaccurate accusations about Horizon flying around Twitter at the moment?

Absolutely.

Is that fair? No. Then again, filing a $50,000 lawsuit against a customer for a snarky remark made to a friend isn’t going to strike many as entirely reasonable either.

I have written about Responding to Negativity before, “You should definitely respond to negative posts. In fact, you simply must respond quickly and carefully. Say you’re sorry, offer to fix the problem, and provide contact information. ”

Of course, Horizon Realty has a bunch of lawyers and such hanging around, waiting to jump on people that get in their way (that’s how things work in Chicago), they even said “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.” Now that is acting stupidly.

How Should Horizon Have Handled This

They could certainly still sue the tweeter, but could have avoided a massive amount of negative press, by simply getting out in front of the issue. Instead of waiting until it was too late to issue a press release like this one, they could have (and should have) exercised a little more intelligence in dealing with the client in the first place. The client filed a suit of her own last month, which Horizon Realty believes is without merit, so I suppose this is a way of “getting back” at the former tenant.

If Horizon Realty felt that it was too late for any customer service opportunities because the tenant had moved out and filed her own suit against Horizon, perhaps a reply to the tweet, and a polite letter asking her to delete it, would have been a better way to start the process. Remember, the word-of-mouth potential here is enormous.

People who have a bad experience tend to tell more people about it than people who have a good experience. Add in an element of schadenfreude on the part of people who like to share stories like this and BAM, millions of people hear about your customer service fail.

I am not a lawyer, but it also seems to me that if you are going to file a lawsuit re: libel, perhaps you should include a little more background and information in the filing. You can read the original PDF here. They included a “definition” of Twitter and a couple of paragraphs lauding their own good standing, but nothing to affirm their claim that the “statements in the Tweet concerning plaintiff were and are wholly false“.

Seriously.

How about if point 10 had been:

10.          The defendant’s apartment was inspected on such-and-such date, 2009 by So-and-So Environmental Company of Riverwoods, IL and the apartment was found to be free of mold. A copy of the report is attached to this filing.

Of course that might have been too obvious. And I suspect that there is still more to this case than we know about. Stay tuned, we will find out if there really was any mold there…