At our conference this summer Dan Cobley, MD of Google said that products with one bad review online will sell more than products with no reviews at all.
This would seem to endorse the cliché that no publicity is bad publicity. (I’m not sure that the royal family would agree with that this month, but then they probably don’t need the publicity).
It is certainly true that if you can build a relationship with your worst critics they can become your biggest fans.
As Don Peppers points out here, a single complainer now can have a disproportionate effect on your reputation. Handled properly however, “as soon as the company does something to contradict that point of view–reaching out to handle the complaint proactively, for instance, or apologizing sincerely and trying to make things right–its action has the potential to completely reverse the customer’s mindset, violating the customer’s expectations once again, but this time in a positive manner. The more a business contradicts the customer’s own pessimistic expectations, the more noticeable and memorable its initiative will be”.
If someone bothers to complain about you, at least they are not indifferent.
I was asked the other day whether I thought you could build a career from getting yourself known rather than focussing on the work. Of course I replied that it’s the work that you should get known for. I was reminded of one very successful person I worked for once (who has gone on to be the global CMO of a world class organisation), let’s call him Fred, and let’s say he started his career at agency ABC. Fred had apparently done the rounds at his first Media Week and Campaign awards season saying to anyone who looked influential “Have you heard about that new chap Fred at ABC ? He’s taking the industry by storm”.
It didn’t do Fred any harm, but I’m not recommending it.
However it is worth remembering that most of the excellent people in our business are “Marmite”. Don’t get crushed by the odd complaint.
Anyway, as George Carlin puts it, people who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.
“Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.”
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012How much is your reputation worth to you, and how careful are you to protect it?
Everyone loves just a little bit of gossip. As it happens I am rubbish at being a purveyor of gossip, and I am always the last to hear anything that’s going on. In an average day I probably spend less than 1% of my time on it. But I think I am an atypical outlier here. What would you say your average daily quotient is? I know people who are up in the 50% plus sector. That takes commitment.
Not many of us like being gossiped about of course. Fortunately it is usually possible to stay blissfully unaware of it. Except online.
Here your reputation is open to view. And deliberate gossip about you is of course one problem, and this can be very upsetting. Account hacking is another irritating issue.
For anyone who is worried about this there is a new way to insure that your reputation is protected online.
For just £3.99 a month you can insure your reputation here.
The company behind the scheme quotes startling figures for account hacking. As ever with its enormous scale, Facebook leads at an average figure of 600,000 accounts hacked daily. Twitter also receives a mention with 55,000 accounts hacked last May.
I enjoy my Twitter account (@sueu). TV events are massively improved by seeing what the people I follow have to say about the entertainment on show. Hearing what the Queen (not the real one) had to say about the Olympic opening ceremony on Twitter was superb entertainment. However I notice that exactly half of all of the messages I get on Twitter are spam. Tedious. Bruce Daisley, if you’re reading this, I feel all our souls are diminished by messages that begin “Hello, somebody is posting really nasty things about you ….”. Can you give me some advice on how to prevent it so that I don’t need to buy insurance?
Meanwhile Margaret Mitchell was writing, in the headline quotation, in days when your reputation was essential to social acceptability. It is still however essential to business success, so you need to take some care to safeguard it.
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