Managing the Customer Conversation
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
If you’re in business there’s one thing you need to accept pretty fast about today’s consumers… they’re more connected, smarter, better informed. It’s not a one way spiel at customers anymore, its about customers connecting to customers in a matrix conversation. As a business, your ability to engage in that conversation will affect the outcomes of customer perceptions about you, your product and your value in their world view.
In Robert Nyman’s post yesterday on Microsoft’s recent marketing campaigns there was some discussion about their recent flopped strategies. Someone in the comments suggested any PR is good PR, but that’s really an olden-days perspective of marketing. The answer is it depends.
In Microsoft’s case they don’t benefit at all from negative PR exposure. We didn’t improve Internet Explorer market share by hounding them about support for web standards and highlighting developer bugs. In their case it simply isn’t better to be talked about than not talked about. We’re hardly going to forget Office and Windows and Internet Explorer, nor are there many out there who have never heard of them. It would be similar with Google, or other iconic businesses.
However, if you’re a startup with everything to gain and very little to lose then any conversation about you is an opportunity to expose yourself to the potential customer base; an opportunity to grow. Being DUGG for a slight glitch in your cool little new project is going to be an awesome boost for your exposure. Its how you manage from that point forward that will determine your bottom line. In this case, the paradigm holds true that any PR is potentially good PR. But its entirely dependant on your reaction to and management of those onflow effects from that catalyst.
