The Power of Conversation
A while back I wrote about how I think that interactive media is great for the advertising and marketing industries because it helps to add value to products and services. When customers have the opportunity to express what they really feel, want and need, companies can provide it more efficiently, and marketers can communicate their value more efficiently to the people who matter to them. With all kinds of forums, sites and blogs like Consumerist, customers now have unprecedented power to effect companies, both positively and negatively, so companies better learn how to deal with and leverage this power.
The website “Conversational Media” is great for those of us who want to keep track of the millions of conversations going on every day, aggregating relevant blog entries and news stories. Four days ago they posted a blog entry from Paul Gillin’s blog speculating about AT&T’s response to the bad press it’s getting from bloggers and other channels for charging a couple in California $300 for not rescuing their receiver while fleeing for their lives when their house got engulfed in the wildfire flames. The story on Consumerist has all kinds of comments, there is a YouTube video of the news story and like Paul Gillin’s post there are probably a great many other people talking about this on the web, offline and in the media.
If companies care more about making money than keeping customers, they aren’t understanding something pretty elementary about business. Customers are the money. As one of the comments on the consumerist post pointed out, how does $300 and tons of bad PR compare to losing a customer, especially when, with a little common sense (aside from the conspicuously lacking compassion), AT&T’s attitude at a time like this could easily have transformed that customer into loyal, lifetime business or even an evangelist for their company! The Social Media Club event I wrote about in June is a great example of how it is becoming more and more obvious how important it is for businesses to pay attention to what is happening. Nowadays companies need to spend more time than ever considering what really matters to them and figuring out how to differentiate themselves not by just providing a good service or product, but by exceeding expectations whenever they can. That’s the power of conversation.
