Gordon Ramsay Gave Up on This Bakery. So Did the Internet.

A company’s online reputation is crucial toward building goodwill, trust and loyalty among consumers. This week one particular restaurant discovered how easy it is to destroy a brand overnight.

Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro took it to a whole new level of crazy earlier this week. The internet had the pleasure of following this embarrassing social media meltdown since it first erupted Monday night. To provide a bit of background, the restaurant is located in Scotsdale, Arizona and was recently featured on an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

Ramsay tried to salvage this lost cause of an establishment, but even he wasn’t able to tame these the crazies. The episode of Kitchen Nightmares aired in Dec. 2012, and five months later they’ve made national headlines spurring from multiple social media blunders on Facebook, Reddit and Yelp.

Online users flooded these sites with negative comments about the restaurant’s unstable owners, sub-par food and questionable business practices. The owners, Samy and Amy, were responding to users who were only fueling the fire at this point. It got ugly when the two started sending out threatening Facebook posts with expletives.

When shit hit the fan, they tried to backtrack by saying their social media accounts were hacked. You really can’t make this stuff up. They were swallowed up and spit out by the internet and it was all their own doing.

Any social media coordinator knows that when negative comments are flooding in, it’s sometimes best to just leave them be. Some may need to be addressed, but sometimes people just need to vent and that’s okay too. Every comment doesn’t require a response. Moderation takes practice, patience and thick skin, but the owners of this bakery clearly didn’t get that memo.

In light of the recent act of social media suicide, Forbes compiled a list of six key things you should never do on social media. If we can take away any piece of advice from this story, I think it would be to never fight the internet. You will never win.