First it is important to understand how this started. Hansen’s did not contact Rock Art, a third party vendor hired to monitor Trademark issues for Hansen’s sent the letter on their own and with no specific request from Hansen’s. This is routine and done by virtually all large companies as they are required to monitor and protect their Trademarks, or risk losing them.

Once the people actually at Hansen’s became aware of the issue, they quickly decided it wasn’t something they really cared about as long as Rock Art wasn’t planning an energy drink.

There was no David Vs. Goliath moment here at all. No giant victory for Social Media uproar. The kind and reasonable bosses at Hansen’s settled the issue with virtually no knowledge of a Social campaign.

By any real measure, the noise Rock Art and it’s supporters made was insignificant. This is a company that sells a billion cans a year, a few angry blog posts, phone calls and emails were virtually meaningless in the big picture.

While Social outrage campaigns certainly can be effective, the simple and true facts in this case is that it had zero impact on Hansen’s decision.

On page 21 of his book Shirky states that, “by making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management, [social media platforms] have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and score of unsupervised effort.” This means that people who would have struggled to have a voice in the past—people like Matt Nadeau—can now communicate with a diverse and vast audience of people; the consequence being we are living in an unprecedented time where everyone, regardless of social, economic or cultural background has the ability to use social media to mobilize a large audience towards a common goal.