Saturday, December 6th, 2008
I had to do a marketing case study or “show and tell” in class awhile ago, what else would I use, but social media?
Two bloggers, Pat Law and Steven Hodson from Singapore and Canada, had negative experiences with Challenger (a Singaporean Best Buy alternative) and Tim Hortons (the Canadian alternative for Starbucks) respectively. With Pat, there was a huge mess with getting delivery on time, horrendous customer service and problems all round. With Steven, a Tim Hortons cashier short changed his wife of $20, and despite the fact that it was obvious from the CCTV that there was an error, they were told there was nothing Tim Hortons could do.
Both cases resulted in pretty strong words from the bloggers and the commenters against the companies involved, but also pretty strong statistics. Pat shared with me her blog stats, and there were over 1,000 views in five days, with the average time spent clocking at six and a half minutes.
Think about that. 1,000 people with 6.5 minutes of negative exposure to your brand. You can buy all the ads you want and you probably won’t even get 6.5 minutes of positive brand exposure in a month.
Why is this a problem?
Any Monkey Can Blog
It’s a problem for companies because it’s just too simple for anyone to set up a blog and blog about a negative experience with your company. Why would I bother picking up the phone calling customer service when odds are I’ll get crappy customer service anyway? It’s just easier to “stick it to the man” online.
The Mistake
Companies are mistakenly not monitoring their brands online, thinking “no one” cares. Well, one thousand people at 6.5minutes each suggest otherwise. I think when we’re talking about customer lifetime value and potentially large amounts of revenue being lost (you can rest assured I’m not buying a television from Challenger although I’m in the market for one), someone should at least be attempting to make things right.
So What Then?
I'm Not Listening
Companies need to focus on good customer service and relationships to differentiate themselves. Especially for companies like Challenger and Tim Hortons who are selling fairly homogenous products, it’s just too easy for a consumer to go to another electronics store or somewhere else for coffee. Particularly in this recession economy, excellent customer service both in and outside the store may just be the differentiating factor you need. If you’re going to hire those service staff anyway, you might as well make sure they’re doing a good job of it.
The bottom line is this. Stop asking what positive ROI social media is going to bring you, because it isn’t the most important question. If it manages to bring in some sales/conversions, great. But at the very least, it can be used to negate the effect of such negative word of mouth. From one blog post, Challenger easily lost a $3k purchase from me, and who knows who else? How many people are going to forego that product from your company because of something they read, and your company did not respond to set things right?
How much is not getting involved in the social media space costing you?
[Image credits: Any monkey can blog | I'm not listening]
Tags: bad customer service, best buy, blankanvas, canadian blogger, challenger, crappy customer service, excellent customer service, homogeneous products, marketing case study, pat law, show and tell, singapore blogger, social media, steven hodson, stick it to the man, tim hortons, winextra
Posted in Marketing, Poor Practices, case studies, social media | 6 Comments »
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
The travesty. It has been a week since I last blogged! Don’t worry, not a sign of things to come, but rather a sign of a c-r-a-z-y week. I have loads of posts lined up including the costs of not being involved in social media, clarifying my stand on “make sure your product doesn’t suck”, a guest interview with Todd Murray of Active Channel, my worries over FeedBurner, an example of media convergence that I do like and why some people don’t get Twitter, among other things. If any of this sounds good to you, check back frequently or why don’t you subscribe via RSS for free, and have it delivered to you when it’s published? And speaking of RSS…
RSS
Steven Hodson tells that Why RSS feed adoption sucks doesn’t get any simpler than this, and I can’t agree more. The problem he talks about - clicking on an RSS feed sign and getting gibberish HTML - happened to me at least twice before I finally adopted RSS. And there were months in between those instances.
Blogging
I have an audio comment on Six Pixels Of Separation #128 by Mitch Joel, sparked by his blog post which asks when is it okay to delete blog comments? I couldn’t believe the number of people who said “My blog, my rules”, so I turned the question around and directed a question at those very same people: “Would it be okay if a company said “my blog my rules?” and went around deleting negative comments?”. I deliberately didn’t blog about this so that the discussion can take place on SPOS, so do give it a listen!
Social Media
The 5 Critical, Current Responsibilities of a Social Media Expert - I dislike the term social media expert because I don’t believe they exist, but in any case, if you’re into social media and adopting it for your company, you need to read this.
More importantly, you need to watch this video from Christopher Penn of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast titled Building Blocks of Social Media: Social Media Prerequisites.. Awesome stuff from beginning to end. The Q&A at the end was very enlightening to me. Usually when we deal with social media plans we jump to the solution, Chris’s questions remind us how important analysis is as well. I can’t embed the video and it’s pretty huge, but definitely worth a watch. And the podcast is worth subscribing to as well.
Research from Epsilon shows promise as to where companies are turning their marketing mix attention to. I personally believe the numbers to be inflated, but nonetheless, good info if you are looking for more stats for corporate buy in.
Podcamp Singapore
Claudia gives us a full recap from what went on at Podcamp Singapore. I definitely would have loved to be there, loved to have spoken and participated, but this is a close second!
That’s it for this week, as always, share your links with me in the comments, or you can find me on delicious.
Tags: #podcampsingapore, active channel, building blocks of social media, christopher penn, claudia.sg, deleting blog comments, feedburner, marketing mix, marketing over coffee, media convergence, mitch joel, podcamp singapore, responsibilities of a social media expert, rss adoption, six pixels of separation, social media, social media prerequisites, social media research, spos, steven hodson, subscribe via rss, todd murray, twitter, winextra
Posted in Links, social media | 2 Comments »
Friday, April 25th, 2008
The article’s out today! I thought it’s pretty good. Hopefully more people will read it and get onto Twitter.
That said, I’m going to be a little cautious about Twitter. Steven Hodson blogged about some of Twitter’s troubles, financially, bringing us back to harsh reality that you can have the best product in the world in the Web2.0 space, but you better have a monetisation plan. Frederic from The Last Podcast updated us a couple of days ago about how Twitter has rolled out ads in Japan (which makes sense since they are so big in Japan)
All the financial worries plus the recent downtime over the weekend and Twitter’s lead architect leaving makes for a slightly worrying future for Twitter. Here’s hoping they can pull their act together soon.
Follow me on Twitter: @uniquefrequency
Tags: microblogging, monetization plan, the last podcast, today twitter article, twitter, twitter ads in japan, twitter caution, twitter downtime, twitter monetisation, twitter monetization, twitter worries, uniquefrequency, winextra
Posted in social media, twitter | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
A regular feature on this blog, here are the other blogs I subscribed to in March which I feel should be shared with the community:
A VC - I have no interest in VC, but every now and then there’s interesting stuff on social media that I read and enjoy.
Socialmedia.biz is a great site keeping up with social media in the business setting.
I like Student Blog Project because the notion of using web2.0 in education is a curiosity of mine and I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon it on ping.sg early in the month.
Inside PR is one of the many podcasts that I’ve added to my Ipod (soon to be Ipod touch) this month. I think it’s a great listen to keep up with what’s happening in the PR scene in Canada. Their recent episode talks about interns not wanting to do admin work (?!). Dave & Terry: I will be in Canada later in the year and will be happy to do admin work on top of whatever else you require.
Pamela, who I also follow on Twitter has a great blog, and us PR/social media students have to stick together!
I also added:
bub.blicio.us and PR 2.0 by Brian Solis
Digital Influence Mapping Project by John Bell
Andy Wibbels
Influential Marketing Blog by Rohit Bhargava
Ubernoggin by Intellagirl aka Sarah Robbins.
Winextra by Steven Hodson
PR and Comms Network
As always, if you have a blog you think I should be subscribing to, please feel free to leave it in the comments section. I’m currently a little overwhelmed by my feeds, but anything that adds value will still be greatly welcome.
Tomorrow: Blogs I’m Subscribed To: Singaporean edition. Lots of good stuff, I promise.
Tags: andy wibbels, blog subscriptions, brian solis, bubblicious, canada, david jones, digital influence mapping project, influential marketing blog, inside pr, intellagirl, john bell, pr 2.0, pr and comms network, pr2.0, rohit bhargava, rss, sarah robbins, social media, steven hodson, student blog project, terry fallis, ubernoggin, vc, web2.0 in education, winextra
Posted in Blogs | 6 Comments »
