When I talk about online reputation management with audiences, I continue to get the questions about how to handle the unfair, unwarranted, or untrue statements that a customer makes against an organization. My first thought is always to say, “you haven’t seen anything yet.” We are just in the very earliest days of consumers starting to learn that they can take out their frustrations on a brand. The deadly cycle we are about to fall into will be that companies will work harder to reach out to consumers that say negative things online in a desperate attempt to minimize damage to their reputation and the more consumers see this, the more they will say bad things – in order to get attention.
Much like a child that is taught to cry for attention, consumers will learn the art of badvocacy and there really is nothing companies can do to stop this tsunami. If they ignore people saying negative things online, they will be embarrassed just like a parent at a grocery store with a screaming child. At least the parent can take the child out of the store to the car and let them scream their heads off. Companies will be faced with hundreds or thousands of screaming customers shortly because everyone that perceives they have been wronged will state it online. Will this be “fair?” Of course it is more complicated than just a simple answer might provide…
I have long said that the wonderful thing about social tools and company performance is that we finally have a very public way to share opinions about service so that consumers can do a simple online search and learn something valuable about the past performance of a company or professional person right from the source. The reality has been that many professionals, and companies could hide poor service, or even criminal behavior, because people did not have a way to tell their stories to other clients or customers. This is how we have had doctors that would abuse many female patients without the next one knowing the danger. This is how we had plumbers that provided terrible service that simply waited for the next call to come in from the next victim. Or, how about the car repair people that rip off every woman that brings a car in with a problem because they believe they can. Online rating systems and keyword searching will help put an end to much of this and I for one and glad that there is finally a solution.
On the other side of the wonderful new dynamic will be the fact that human beings have a propensity to say negative things in higher volumes than positive things. They are also moved to action more by negative emotions than positive ones. In other words, we will blog or tweet more about the poor service we have received than the good. Some people think we will eventually just tune out the negative mentions because we will realize this. Uhhhh, no. We will not tune them out, and we are already seeing that things like restaurant reviews on Yelp are driving revenue away from locations with poor food and service to the ones that actually perform at a high level. I am afraid that badvocacy is going to work, and we will pay attention to it.
Look for a ten-year curve with this one. I think it will take that long for us to all get used to using this new capability, for companies to figure out how to deal with it, and for us to find ways to sort through the unwarranted negatives in order to get a true picture before we make a buying decision. We will learn to somehow rate advocates, and badvocates so that we know if they are positive plants, or negative crybabies. We will sort it all out and when the smoke clears, we will have invented a crowd based way to force service and product providers to perform at high levels and I suspect will look back on the times previous to this as being like the dark ages when people bought products and services completely blind…
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com