Social media has given consumers a whole new voice so companies better not give consumers anything bad to talk about.

What happens when your brand gets its 15 minutes of fame on YouTube, but for the wrong reason? This is exactly what Taco Bell went through. A video of rats running around a Taco Bell’s store in New York was posted on YouTube.

Just minutes after, duplicates and new versions started to spread across the web and till this date, these videos have been viewed approximately 2 million times. As a result, customers raised concerns about its cleanliness and Taco bell’s stock price and 7,000 franchisees sales were affected.

Hewlett-Packard, which released a web camera that supposedly track people’s faces – always keeping them centered on screen -, got slammed when a buyer posted a video claiming that the product doesn’t recognize African American faces. The video, posted under the title “HP Computers Are Racist,” has been viewed more than 1 million times. Here’s the video:

And what happened to:

• United when they refused to listen and take corrective action after damaging the guitars of Dave Carroll:  “United Breaks Guitars” phenomenon
• Habitat when they used hashtags related to the popular search terms at the time

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