• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, November 28, 2017

Remember that Oscars snafu when a couple of PricewaterhouseCoopers bean counters botched the handoff on the Best Picture award, leading Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to name the incorrect winner on live TV?

Well, there must be some senior IT types at J. Crew who feel pain somewhat akin to what those PwCers felt, when on Cyber Monday the retailer’s site crashed.

Oh boy. That’s tough. To have that happen after all the planning and effort for one of the biggest sales events of the year.

I can empathize a bit. I mean, I’m not perfect; I’ve had an embarrassing moment or two in my career. Hundreds of millions of dollars in retail sales weren’t at stake, but nonetheless.

And the chatfest that is social media wasn’t pleased with J. Crew.

The retailer received the most negative social media chatter during the past long weekend of marathon shopping when the retailer's site crashed in the middle of Cyber Monday, according to agency Drumroll. The Austin-based agency measured the love and negative feedback for brands' social mentions during the weekend-long shopping rush to assess the impact on both brand affinity and awareness.

On a more positive note, the agency reported that Microsoft and peripheral gaming hardware brand HyperX experienced the highest fan sentiment. HyperX's headset and keyboard giveaways drove the majority of mentions and positive chatter as did Microsoft's Mixed Reality and Surface deals.

With over 3 million tweets monitored, Etsy and Amazon were the most-talked about brands, with more than 9,000 and 8,600 mentions, respectively.

Shoppers engaged in an unusually high number of audio-based posts, with words like “sound,” “noise-cancelling” and “wireless” all landing in the top 1% of words used. 4K TVs were also one of the most discussed products customers were looking for, with the 50" model being the most popular size. Yes, the bowl games are going to look particularly awesome this year from the living-room couch.

Video games, gaming consoles and accessories rounded out the most popular deals over the weekend.

According to Drumroll, other Black Friday-through-Cyber-Monday chat trends this year included the rise of peer-to-peer shopping sites like Etsy, Ebay, Shopify, Zazzle and Society6.

Amazon's AmazonSmile was in the top 1% of all words used, per the Drumroll analysis, at least in part due to Amazon’s bulked up promotion of the cause-related platform this year.  

In addition, REI's #OptOutside campaign, which encourages employees and customers to spend their day off with REI closing down for the day, saw some heightened sentiment as a result.

According to Drumroll’s analysis, the Top 10 most loved brands are: HyperX, Microsoft, Sephora, Rawlings,
Vizio, BJ's Wholesale, Samsung, Sony, Bose and Sam's Club. And the top-10 overall most-talked-about brands are: Etsy, Amazon, Ebay, Bose, Victoria's Secret, Xbox, Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Apple.

I don’t think any of their sites crashed. There’s an insight for you J. Crew. Keep that in mind for next year.