When it hits the halls of Dilbert’s cube farm, you know it’s becoming pervasive! Just wait and watch a few weeks, and “gossipsize” will become one of those terms you’ll see in Wired’s Jargon Watch. Sounds much cooler than “online reputation management.” Thank you, Scott Adams, for yet another brilliant way to brighten our day.
BTW, if you haven’t checked out Dilbert.com lately, you should. It’s a phenomenal example of using social media to enable a community of advocates to spread your brand. Mix, mash and share to your friends’ delight.
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.
My colleague David Krejci has an internal social media newsletter that I really enjoy. It is called Your New Times and I always learn from it. This week’s edition focused on something called Astroturfing which is defined as fake buzz. The article in the newsletter written by “stingray” is about how people fake comments or create controversies on YouTube, Facebook and other sites to make them look like they have lots of friends or visitors or detractors. Using stingray’s definition — Astroturfing is when a public relations campaign seeks to create the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior (hence the reference to the artificial grass Astroturf). Astroturfing is a prime example of what we call badvocacy.
I wonder how it can be stopped or found out. If anyone knows, please let me know. I am always interested in how to combat badvocacy.
