On-line reputation
By Sara Scott, 7th February 2008 at 9:22 pm
The rise of blogging culture has got loads of corporate types in a tizzy. They are worried that their beautiful (and expensive) brands will be bought crashing to their knees by armies of bloggers on smear campaigns triggered either by poor product experiences - or simply for the hell of it (apparently a lot of bloggers are bitter and twisted and have nothing better to do than complain and rubbish innocent companies. . . )
I’m not sure how many small business reputations are either built or broken through blogging alone. . . but whether it’s in the virtual or real world, one thing’s for sure. Bad news sure travels quicker than good news. And a real horror story about any kind of consumer experience is somehow much more interesting and hence ‘viral’ or ’sticky’ than a piece of good news.
To read deeper insight on this phenomenon, I’d like to point you at a site I discovered just last week, thanks to a commenter on this very blog. (Sheesh, that’s how those crazy networks become self fulfilling. . .) This site is obviously put together by some seriously marketing savvy cookies and lots of the content is really ‘out there’ thinking. But the blog is well structured, so if you have a particular topic in mind, you’ll probably find some interesting food for thought.
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You may want to check out a very interesting site called http://www.hellopeter.com where it is possible to compliment or complain about companies. In many cases I have been able to bypass the usual bureaucracy and complain to someone who has the clout to make a difference.
Which leads me to the question: if you search for your company name followed by the word “complaint”, what do you find? The results can be fairly scary.
Comment by Donn Edwards — February 16, 2008 #
Reputation management for people would appear to be here (whether we are conscious of it or not) via Facebook/Linkedin/etc. but the impact on businesses has just started.
I accept that bloggers are changing the face of news distribution. But most people don’t blog. Over the next couple of years we will see a large amount of people review their experience with all businesses from large to small but via structured local review platforms and not blogs.
As co-founder of a social review site I see the importance of addressing customer reviews as the key method of addressing online reputation.
http://www.bview.co.uk
Comment by Colin Bruce — May 7, 2008 #
BView comments are cool…
My old company Simply Business have been replying to their reviews on BView (well, the bad ones) and have done a great job….
Trackback by Interbweb Musings — May 7, 2008 #