Businesses Beware – The Blog is Mightier Than the Pen
“I’m a writer and I blog.” This sentence, posted at the end of a consumer complaint to any business should strike fear into the heart of its recipient. Note to self: You’re about to be fricasseed. Time to take action: yesterday.
Faster than a polymorphic virus, more powerful than a super computer, it’s [strike up hero's leitmotif] Today’s Blogger! TB’s golden prose (heck, it doesn’t even have to be good writing), shot off the keyboard with a click, is rocketed into cyberspace, multiplied across social media platforms, posted in ezines and consumer complaint sites, and comes back to bite the recipient in the arse. Hard.
The world has changed, and we business owners need to wake up and smell the quadruple Venti nonfat latte. What once would have been a matter between a consumer and a business now can bring down that business, even a Goliath-size business, permanently. David’s stone? A laptop and a WiFi connection. Here are …
10 Tips on Surviving Today’s Blogging Community
- Get real with yourself. Online reputations can make or break your business. Nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide.
- Pay attention to complaints. They’re not going to go away until you do something about them.
- Give good service in the first place. Even after a complaint is satisfied, the complaint has proliferated across multiple platforms. Prevention is the best remedy to any complaint.
- Read and respond to e-mail quickly. (Hint: if you’ve assigned the task of reading and responding to e-mail to someone who either isn’t married to you or doesn’t have at least a 51% stake in your company, you might want to rethink that decision.) Same goes for phoned-in complaints and letters via snail mail (does anyone actually send those anymore?)
- Have an ongoing dialogue with your consumers. If you have a solid relationship in the first place, it’s unlikely that one error will make someone call in the dogs. (Until they e-mail your underling and don’t get a satisfactory response.)
- Monitor the Web. You should regularly scan for your company name, especially on consumer complaint sites. What you don’t know can hurt you. Badly.
- If you screw up, admit it. Admit it on the same blog you’re blasted on (even if you continue to get blasted, hold your temper).
- Offer to make it right. Be unreasonable with yourself. That means going above and beyond what the situation calls for.
- If the blogger was mistaken, ask politely for a retraction. If you don’t get one, post the truth without sounding defensive. You can assign this task to the same person who failed to answer the original complaint in a timely manner, but I wouldn’t.
- This one you learned in business school: the customer is always right. Don’t put being right ahead of being in business. The online community is large, but very, very close-knit.
Yvonne Buchanan’s company, epublisher Knowledge Base Publishing, does joint ventures with authors of ebooks to edit, publish and market their products, some of which are promoted on her free article submission site,800Muses.com
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