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Search engines keep rants alive forever

MITCH JOEL

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Everybody has customer-service complaints. It’s human nature to tell a story when you feel you’ve been wronged.

In a social media world, where sharing that story with the world is only a blog post away, the stakes for companies have been raised.

And it’s not the actual complaints, comments or blog posts that hurt the most. It’s the the lingering Google search results that represent the real death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a topic that has been discussed, debated and dissected in the blogosphere since the early days. But the big question remains: do the complaints actually have an effect or are people just talking to themselves in their own little fishbowl?

Does the public know or care about raging online controversies like Hasbro defending its Scrabble trademark against the creators of the Scrabulous Facebook application or a copyright tussle over whether a bunch of Ford Mustang owners will be able to create and sell a calender with pictures of their Black Ford Mustangs via online marketplace CafePress?

If you were to survey a group of people walking downtown in any major metropolitan city in the world, what percentage of them would have even heard about the Hasbro-Scrabulous story? Does that make the story a non-issue?

The answer is both yes and no. Because of the way news now travels, we’re not all glued to one channel that has been edited for our “viewing pleasure.”

We can follow stories that not only matter to us as individuals, but that matter to the industries we serve or are interested in. The big “headline of the day” has become whatever we want it to be.

I think the game has changed. Here are four shifts in media and what they mean to marketers:

Media is much more fragmented. Not too long ago, there were only a handful of media and because of this, the stories were fairly similar. Cable brought us the whole “57 channels and nothing on” culture and then blogs made individuals into media empires.

The “mass” in mass media is quickly going away. People get their news/information from several unique and targeted outlets now. So, what’s news in my world is not news in your world. Forget about the Blogosphere, just look at specialty television. You could spend the whole year and only watch Home and Garden related programming (and you wouldn’t even have to change the channel).

The fishbowl is getting bigger and bigger. While these customer-service rants seem more like annoyances from a small group of people playing around with blogs, their impact is actually being amplified by a a shift in how people get their content and news. We’re moving from trusting “similar others” to trusting “similar others as trusted news sources.” Audiences for blogs and podcasts continue to rise as more and more people consume this content as an alternative/addition to their current media regime.

The Google Effect. All of this content lives forever in a search-engine optimized environment. As more and more people go online for their primary research, blog posts about rotten customer service continue to take their toll. Even if a customer-service rant gets resolved quickly and efficiently, the story lingers in those search results forever. Stories don’t die in a newspaper morgue anymore.

More than even, companies need to monitor, analyze and strategically plan what (and how) they’re going to say and do in these channels. More than ever, just reacting isn’t proving to be a sufficient response. More than ever, companies need to be looking at blogs, podcasts and even Twitter or Facebook status updates to hear the voice of the customer.

Blogs are not “so yesterday.” If anything, this type of content and communication is just starting to find its voice and establishing itself as one of the strongest media forces that can shape a business and its brand.

Thursday, February 07, 2008
Adman Ignacio Oreamuno pointed to marketing execs in the audience and fired off quick tips for promoting their brands online.

“L’Oréal, your business is to make women pretty. So why don’t you offer a service to make women’s websites pretty?

“Bell, Telus. There are forums out there where phone nerds talk about customizing and changing their handsets. Why don’t you create a network for them to have these discussions in your site?

“Canon, photo-sharing sites like Flickr show which camera people used to take pictures. Why don’t you create a network for people who use your cameras and offer them promotions, like free photo printing?”

But in the end, what matters most is for companies to be bold and creative, speakers said yesterday at a conference on using social networks to build a brand.

“This is the Wild West,” said Oreamuno, president of Ihaveanidea.org, a social network for advertising people.

Social networks like MySpace and Facebook are very new, there are few rules, and usually, the first one there gets to the gold.

However, they represent a massive shift in how people communicate. They empower consumers to slam a brand without mercy. And they can no longer be ignored. Any company serious about being “with it” has to be willing to pour resources into it, said Rick Murray of the digital division of public-relations firm Edelman.

“You need to think about how you’ll play in this space every single day,” Murray said. “You can’t just launch a campaign and see how it evolves. That kind of thinking is so yesterday.”

It’s a lesson that Cogeco Cable Inc. took home.

The cable company, which serves parts of Quebec and eastern Ontario, had dabbled in Facebook, targeting ads to university students at Queens, Windsor and McMaster.

“We only touched the tip of it,” Marie-Claude Caron, Cogeco’s director of marketing, said at the conference hosted by advertising magazine Infopresse.

“A year ago, we weren’t even thinking about having these positions. I mean, a social marketing manager? Who knew?”

This rapid change of how people use technology to share tastes is a source of panic attacks for marketing departments that can’t keep pace. Murray travels the word preaching to his clients that they should accept this reality or become obsolete.

“This is a major societal shift,” he said. “We need to think from a sociologist’s and cultural anthropologist’s perspective.”

It’s fashionable for companies to say they want to have dialogues with customers, rather than relying on traditional top-down messages. But of all the brands that say they get it, only five per cent are doing it, Murray said.

“Sending an email to bloggers does not count,” he said. “Putting an ad in Facebook is not a conversation.”

He pointed to cold medicine Motrin, which made a site for moms with tips and news on children’s cold medication. The site has a forum where they can ask questions and talk among themselves.

“You have to think about being a newspaper,” he said. “Offer new snack-sized content every day.”

This shift does not mark the death of traditional marketing, Murray assured. To have

a mass nation-wide reach, television spots, billboards and print ads will still have a role to pay.

But even though marketing departments will have to increase in head count, the costs of marketing will decrease, he predicts. Social campaigns are cheap, and as more resources shift online, it will pull down spending.

This should be all the more reason for companies to take chances.

“In this world of communities, you get credit for trying,” Murray concluded. “You don’t have to get it right every time.”