Remember my
experiment with Jott last week?
Well someone from Jott
came by the blog to offer their support. Good for them!
It’s relatively easy for someone to find instances
of their company, product, or brand on the web and see what people are saying
about them – yet, few companies do.
Or if they do, few comment or participate in
conversations.
Harvard
Business Review did, very well I might add!
Twitter, Microsoft, Second Life, Apple, YouTube, American
Airlines, and many others, all didn’t.
I’ve read many detailed accounts of others’ brand
experiences, and also rarely see a comment from the brand owner.
Reports can be positive or negative and there are
still no responses.
I’m not sure why this is.
The popular perception is that they either don’t know
people are discussing them or they don’t care. No one actually knows because they aren’t saying anything!
Do you look for mentions of your product on the web?
What do you do when you find one?
Michele –
It will be nice to see you from time to time!
Ann
Ann,
I wish I could say that I had many of these types of clients but the one I did reinforced in my mind that branding is not always about pro-active marketing and is sometimes about actively reacting. Hmm, I smell a blog post in that sentence. 😉
Since the client was actually the company’s competitor, I can only hope they took what I found to heart. It was a sub-contracted job and I never got to speak with the client so I don’t know what they did or did not do with the information.
Your blog is a refreshing change from the SEO, get rich quick and other over-done and often low-quality stuff I see on a daily basis. Will be bookmarking and revisiting!
Michele
Hi Michele –
Well at least some people are hiring you to do this for them!
It’s amazing what can happen when a company engages with their customers. I think they might also be thinking too small or narrow.
“If I respond to everyone it’s an expense for what type of benefit.”
What they’re missing is that blogs do fairly well in the search engines and when they don’t respond they run the risk of the highest ranked results for a search on their brand are conversations in which they aren’t participating!
Come by again – I like the way you think!
Ann
I was hired to do some competitor market research for a fairly expensive product ($100k per unit). It didn’t take long to find a dozen or more blog, forum, and other posts where people expressed interest in buying their product. Yet, the company failed to find and capitalize on any of these opportunities. I suspect some of the issue may stem from a regional sales system – a rep in California can not sell to a customer in Florida sort of thing.
Seems like a no-brainer that everyone who sells and works on the Internet should periodically check their brand. I don’t understand why the big players do not have someone in the marketing department doing this almost exclusively. Then again, I wouldn’t mind getting another “Find out what are people saying about us and/or our competitor” client.
Karin –
I would expect nothing less from you!!! You’re totally on the ball!
Ann
Hi Ann
I do 😉 Blog searches on company name, straight into my feed reader – plus every Saturday morning I spend 1 hour going through my statcounter projects to see if there are any ‘incoming’ new links to my static websites (and when someone writes about you most of the time they are bound to link to your site, my experience anyway).
Haven’t encountered any negative remarks on or to our company, so can’t tell you how I would respond. But respond I would certainly do! (In a nice way. no doubt ;-))
Karin H (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specailly in business)