The Arab Spring, Occupy and now the Les Menuires 7 – the Millennials are showing how natural they find it to use social media to fight injustice.

The Les Menuires 7
In this latest case – the Les Menuires 7 – seven chalet hosts have barricaded themselves into their luxury chalet after apparently being dismissed with immediate effect and told that they will not receive any wages.

The Les Menuires 7

Companies must respond quickly to negativity on social media
We have looked before at how companies need to respond promptly and accurately when social media turns against them.  In the case of Sunshine Village, it became a public relations disaster.  For Snowbasin Resort, a relatively prompt response and apology was much more successful.

The company in this case is ‘Ski The 3V‘ – and at this point the silence is deafening.  There has been no comment on their Facebook page, Twitter or via their website.  We tried to contact them for their side of the story, but were only able to leave a message and have not heard back.

Serious social media momentum
In the meantime, the Les Menuires 7 Facebook group is flying.  It launched on Tuesday evening and passed 1000 fans on Wednesday evening.   The Natives and Snowheads forums both have active threads and the hashtag LM7 on Twitter is getting a lot of activity.

One of the Seven was interviewed on BBC Radio Norfolk today (go to 1:55 in) and a Bolton community website has also run a story.   We predict the dailies and other snowsports websites will pick up on this in the next 24 hours.

And what of the Seven?
Although we have not seen any confirmation that the seven were indeed sacked without pay, their Facebook page suggests they have already received an improved offer.

Previous guests have written messages of support

If the allegations are indeed true, then the company deserves all the bad publicity it is getting.

The lesson for other brand owners out there is that if, for whatever reason, social media starts working against you, then simply ignoring it will rarely help your cause.

 

We will update this article in the comments section below as this story progresses.