There’s nothing worse than getting a bad product/service, complaining about it, and then getting the cold shoulder from the company that wronged you.
By not having reputation management in place that company probably just lost you, all your friends, and all your friend’s friends as customers.
Good Reputation Management
Comcast is a US Cable company with sometimes lousy customer service* when talking to them on the phone. If you complain about Comcast on Twitter an awesome customer service rep will respond to your tweet within minutes and resolve the situation.
Comcast isn’t the only company monitoring and responding to negative sentiment on Twitter; Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and even the search engine Bing are helping their customers everyday.
If you’re not engaging with your followers on Twitter, or don’t even use Twitter then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity to change people from angry customers to satisfied customers, and maybe even evangelists for your brand.
*Comcast is an example of a company that gets it right online despite consistently failing offline
Bad Reputation Management
- Ford is one of the biggest companies in the world, and yet they don’t control ford.com which redirects to a gelato bar in Illinois. While not a big deal right now, there’s plenty of damage than can be done to Ford’s reputation if an angry customer or spammer had control of that domain.
- Heinz punished one of their biggest evangelists on Twitter, @HJHeinz. They had a great opportunity to leverage a brand evangelist who was already promoting them for free, instead they reacted poorly by taking his Twitter name away and made themselves look bad in the process. Heinz still doesn’t have a presence on Twitter today.
- @BPGlobalPR is not an official voice of BP, but in fact an imposter. @BPGlobalPR arose because BP did such a bad job of reputation management directly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They post satirical tweets about BP’s message and mission statement. The only reason the account hasn’t been pulled is because it’s considered parody and within Twitter’s usage guidelines.
Bad Reputation Management Case Study
Since it’s so much fun to read about people getting it wrong, here’s a fascinating article about bad reputation management and what happened with a salon’s online reputation after appearing on the TV show Tabitha’s Salon Takeover.
Basically the owner of the salon in the episode was portrayed as a terrible boss and after the episode aired their Facebook page had an avalanche of negative comments; it didn’t stop there either, their reviews on Yelp and Google Places suffered too.
The salon was obviously completely unaware of reputation management and did a terrible job of trying to put out the fire and in fact made it even worse.
Next Week
We’ll look at steps you can take to protect your brand and monitor sentiment
In the meantime we’d love to hear from you if you’re keen to talk about a project or just get some ideas about cost.
e-CBD is located on the Gold Coast and has an open door policy, so if you’d like to visit meet with us to discuss your project, we’d love to have you! Please call us to make an appointment on 07 5531 3810.
