Now I’m sure a lot of us have seen Marina Shifrin’s video on Youtube where she quits her job through an interpretive dance on the pretext that her boss cares more about the quantity of views on a video rather than quality of content.  This video has been up for about a week now and its already got over 13 million views. And I can’t help but say that I think it’s brilliant!

A few days after it came out, New Media Animation (the company she was resigning from) responded with a parody version. It was the same song, same style, but the aim of the message seemed to be rather defensive: “We are a great company to work for and we want everyone to know that we are hiring”.

Did they do a good job of responding? Sadly, I’m going to have to say no! And the key issue here is that they really just weren’t listening and while they were quick to respond, I fear that their response was more harmful than it was helpful. If you see the comments in their video, there’s a lot of negativity and way more dislikes than likes.

Marina states off the bat in her video that NMA is a great company to work for and was simply trying to make a point about how to make good videos by focusing on content. Yes, it was still rather embarrassing for NMA, but she did make the point – her content led to 13 million views in a week whereas NMA’s videos rarely make it to a million.

So what would have been a better response from NMA instead of stating they were an awesome company and were now hiring? Maybe something that simply said: “We heard you Marina, you made a good point and we are thankful for you bringing this to our attention”. Their current response seems a lot more personal and lacks class, originality and wit.

Wonder if they even have a crisis response strategy because if they do, it either isn’t a good one or they just did not apply it well here! I’d be worried abour reputation if I was NMA.