There has been a lot of talk recently about the impact of the blogosphere on a product or a company. Some accuse bloggers of being rabble-rousing communists drunk on power, hell-bent on making companies run the way they deem fit. Others view it as the responsibility of companies to listen to their individual customers and respond to each of them in kind.
The answer, it seems, lies somewhere in between the two extremes.
The reality of online buzz is that the only way to ensure that nobody talks about your product is to make it completely unremarkable. There’s a reason that nobody talks about their showerhead or their favourite brand of toilet paper online – it’s because nobody talks about it in real life either. As I have said before, there are only two types of people who create buzz about a product online:
- Extremely happy people.
- Extremely pissed off people.
The only way to get your product talked about is to ensure that your product, your customer service, your advertising or your company in general positively delights or angers your customers. If you have miserable customer service and draconian policies, people are going to hear about it – and likely from Jeff Jarvis.
If, on the other hand, you go out of your way to give great customer service, people are going to hear about it too. They’re probably not going to announce it as often or with as much passion as when you screw up, but if you make enough individual customers happy, you’re going to develop a reputation for making people happy. The same is true for the opposite, though that reputation is not nearly as easy to shake.
So what does that mean for the influence of bloggers? The blogosphere is a brilliant barometer of your success, and one that people are going to check before investing in a relationship with your company. In that respect, the blog influence is huge – bloggers have become global opinion leaders in their respective knowledge circles. Companies need to listen to bloggers, not so bloggers can dictate how business is run, but because they represent a larger community, and will report back to that community how the company really conducts itself.
However, we must always keep in mind that bloggers are not representative samples of a given customer base. Sure, the percentage of bloggers will skew high with various products, but for the average everyday consumer stuff, we have to remember that we are a specific market. Sometimes a little more educated, usually a little more geeky, and seemingly more prone to outrage than the average consumer.
The effect that bloggers cause is for now, short term. Companies that are most affected by blogstorms can easily bounce back, but as more and more casual consumers start to develop their online voice, dusting oneself off after a blog knock-out is going to get more difficult.
At the same time, bloggers must be careful not to tarnish the reputation they have developed. Already, the image of torch-wielding extremists has been conjured by many critics, and if bloggers continue making demands of the corporate world, that image may sap the influence from the blogosphere one boycott at a time.
Just think of how much stock the average consumer puts in activist groups. That’s not what we want to become.
Companies have to remember this – blog buzz as a general indicator of where you stand in the mind of the consumer, but don’t forget about the majority of your consumers who don’t live online.
The blogosphere is a barometer. Ignoring it before you go out to sea could be disastrous. Viewing it as an infallible metric of your customer base, however, may be just as short-sighted.
