April 24, 2007 Comments
There's a great article in the Baltimore Sun that looks at the power of consumer voices online and the way that those voices can impact the success (or failure) of a company. With social media taking off like a firestorm and YouTube alone having more content online last year than the entire web did in 2000, companies that continue to ignore online reputation management are doing so at their own peril.
The article uses the now famous Jeff Jarvis / Dell Hell example to explore how companies are changing their online PR policies so that they are better prepared to react to consumer comments online.
"Before Jarvis, Dell had a policy of 'watch but don't touch' regarding Internet criticism," said Paul Walker, executive vice president of GCI Group, a communications consultancy that has worked with Dell.
After its Jarvis experience, Walker said, Dell initiated its own blogs and instituted a policy of contacting customers who criticize or praise the company online. That decision served Dell well last year when news broke that some of its laptop computers exploded in flames, and the company reacted promptly with a recall, he said.
The article goes on to explain that Dell now has employees committed to scouring the web in three languages and to responding to both positive and negative comments that are being posted online. While Dell had to learn its lesson the hard way, there's no denying that the lesson was learned and that they are taking serious steps to improve their relationship with customers.
The problem for small business owners is often in figuring out how to afford a service that they may or may not need.
Companies can hire services to monitor their mentions online, much as they might hire a clipping service to retrieve published articles, Brodeur said, but this poses a problem for a small business.
"Do you want to pay for a service that you may or may not show up in?" he said. "You've got to make this inexpensive for small and midsized companies to afford."
Thankfully, there are quite a few new services popping up online that are making online reputation monitoring more affordable for small shops. Distilled's new Reputation Monitor is a great example of this. More products like this should end up popping up over the next six months or so and smart small business owners will take advantage of free trials to give these services a test run.
Don't learn your lesson the hard way like Dell and others have. Get your reputation management plans in place before you need them. It will save you a lot of headaches...I promise.
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