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Badvocacy: Sharing the Pain

At Weber Shandwick, we’ve been warning companies about badvocacy as long as we’ve been encouraging them to tap into the power of advocacy. Badvocacy is simply the act of criticizing companies, brands or products and it’s becoming rampant as social media accelerates (as my mother recently gleefully declared after dealing with a customer service injustice, “You don’t even need to picket the store anymore, you just go on the Internet!”). Highlighting this trend, the Society for New Communications Research recently released the results of a survey sponsored by Nuance Communications that shows that 59 percent of active Internet users use social media to vent about a customer care experience. That’s a lot of venting.

Lest companies make the mistake of shrugging off online critics or dismissing social media as a valid communications channel, the study also finds that the majority of online consumers are using the Internet to research companies’ customer care reputations before making the purchase (72 percent) and choose companies or brands based on others’ experiences they read about online (74 percent). Most consumers (81 percent) believe that blogs, discussion forums and online ratings systems give consumers a greater voice (our own research supports this newfound sense of empowerment: more than half of online respondents say they have more power to influence company success or failure today than ever before). 

So even if customers aren’t writing about negative experiences, they’re reading about, and heeding, the experiences of others. Companies can’t hide from badvocacy – they need to recognize that the function of customer service has been forever changed. They need to respond to situations in new and inventive ways that minimize the risk of an unhappy customer escalating his or her problems to the world.

Looking forward to the full report from SNCR and Nuance due out later this year.