There is a justifiable fear out there in the B2B Professional Services space that once we allow people to comment on our blog or become a member of our LinkedIn group we will open the backdoor to negative comments circulating online “in perpetuity”. Professional service brands are built on reputation of the company, its executives and the quality of the service they provide. It is natural to want to keep weaknesses or shortcomings close to vest. Who among us has never received a complaint email from a disgruntled client? It might not even be related to the service we provide. The client might just be having a bad day. We don’t want those emails displayed on our home page. Home page is a place for shinny happy testimonials strategically placed to be found by those friendly search engine robots.
But here is another perspective to consider. Contemporary marketing strategies such as demand generation and customer engagement practices have relationship building at their core. And relationships are built around interactions. So in that sense every interaction is an opportunity to build a relationship. We have to change our thinking and start looking at negative comments as opportunities and welcome them to reside on our website, blog or fan page instead of circulating out there in cyberspace without even our knowledge.
With blogs, Facebook groups, LinkedIn discussions, YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare and many other social media outlets companies have to embrace the fact that there will be instances where the content we put out there might rub someone, somewhere the wrong way. Social media platforms give us an opportunity humanize our brand and clearly demonstrate how committed we are to solving our customers’ problems.
As we gear up for demand generation efforts it is important to get comfortable with possibility of negative comments or reactions to the content. Instead have a clear roadmap as to how the company will respond, who will be in charge of tracking and answering, what incentive to offer as a follow up and how to measure. Having a strategy is the solution, instead of last minute scrambling to respond or hiding in case we get negative feedback.
Friday, January 08, 2010
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If you only create a blog for positive feed-back, save your time. This is an age of two way communication and learning. Use your blogs to push to the edge. Create anger and confrontation. Create challenges and uncomfortable people. These are not times for wimps but times for pushiness and ideas. It is era for creativeness and new ideas to help us all. I encourage it in articles on the Sales Lead Management Assocition site.
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