Brand Assassins: The Dark Side of Social Media

Recently, as reported in City A.M and written in my blog, I found myself in a conflict with a retailer.  To make a long story a little shorter, my son got enough money to buy an Xbox 360 from his grandparents.  Excited, he and I shopped the Internet and carefully made the price conscious choice to buy the toy from PC World at a price savings of $25 over the same product on Amazon. We then sat back to await our next day delivery and were quite disappointed when it did not appear.  

For a moment I will digress...

I'm a serial entrepreneur and I've started and run a hefty collection of businesses involving hardware, software and shipping. I know how hard it is to move boxes around. Managing stock, working with different shipping companies, tracking packages...it is a logistical gauntlet.

On the other hand I also know it is possible to create systems that handle these tasks quite efficiently and PC World has been in business long enough to have invested in those systems should they have been so inclined. 

I also understand that most of their customers don't have my background in business, management, online transactions or, most important on this occasion, marketing. So when their Xboxes don't arrive, they spend hours and hours over several days literally begging to get the product they paid for. They can't figure out what is going on and they can't do much about it even if they find out. They just have to wait. 

There are days when it is Good to be a Dragon...

Having just run several courses in social media marketing, and with something of a Twitter following, I started tweeting my disatisfaction with PC World after I'd spent a few days trying to get what my son had paid for. Given the nature of my Twitter list, I wasn't surprised that in just a few tweets I found myself in contact with the Head of Media Relations for the Dixons Group which owns PC World.  

This gentleman and I spoke, and the next day I got a call from PC World...and found myself hearing the same excuses and empty promises I'd heard before. Ultimately I asked for a refund, placed my order with Amazon, and set about creating an ebook about the whole tawdry customer service experience to share with 350 ad agencies.

You can download this very attractive ebook if you like.  

What This Illustrates

There's no doubt that social media can drive business revenues up fast, and it should be no surprise that it can also make those revenues fall just as quickly.  Given a large enough customer base and bad enough customer service, social media can even put an enterprise right out of business.  That's because the larger your enterprise gets the more chance you have of running into a superuser who knows how to use social media effectively, and chances are that guy is connected to other folks who are just as effective. The result is that people find out how your business really works and decide they would rather just buy from someone else. The only effective antidote to this kind of thing is an overwhelming number of happy customers who are just determined to defend you which is almost certainly the one thing you don't have.

Can You Protect Your Business from Social Media?

If your business doesn't rely on social media for many of its sales you may feel you are isolated from it's effects when things go wrong.  

But every business is part of the community it operates in and whether a business is, itself, active on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn doesn't matter a great deal. Because your customers, your investors, your strategic partners and your employees probably are.

A determined customer can reach through these networks, and websites like the RipOffReport.com, to impact you even when you are making every effort not to engage them.  

So, whether you like it or not, your company's survival probably depends on getting things like ecommerce, shipping, tracking and customer service right so you don't irritate enough people to run into someone like me.  

This isn't 1995 when a leading, high value business, can simply focus on closing sales while ignoring fulfillment and customer support. You can't trap people in phone hell any more. 

What should you do when bad social media negatively impacts your business?

Just fix the problem. PC World just needs to fix it's ecommerce site so it accurately reflects what is in stock and how long delivery will really take. It has to enable it's staff to quickly track missing packages and ensure the promises they make are always fulfilled. Having managed shipping departments and customer service departments I'm willing to be the management at PC World has several great employees working with them who have written more than a few memos about these issues without much success.  Maybe the message will be clearer when it comes from outside the company.