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Sep
12
Power to the customers
Filed Under Autonomy, Communication, Social web, Projects, Business
A friend emailed me a link saying ‘you won’t like this’.
An Australian accounting software developer blames a “severe downturn in sales” on people who bad-mouthed its products in online user forums. It wants a judge to muzzle their comments.
Apart from being a serious contender for the Darwin Award - seriously, suing people for making comments about its products and services! - it is also a company with a mindset I ranted about recently.
Let’s have a look at the offending ‘word of mouth’:
Among the challenged statements are incendiary comments such as these:
If you deal in Foreign Currency at all, I would avoid it. It was one of the big issues we faced … and don’t get me started on the inventory and manufacturing system - what a joke.
and
I was put onto this forum recently after discussion with peers, about how frustrated, dissatisfied and ultimately ripped off I feel after purchasing 2clix earlier this year … Our company has been trying to implement 2clix for sometime now and we are still in the implementation process and feel like we are getting nowhere fast.
These are very mild comments indeed. They would hardly register on the heat scale in most flame wars in the blogosphere. So on top of a company that has bad products and services and doesn’t know how to treat its customers, we also have a software developer that has no clue about the web and the conversations it spawns.
And now for the good news:
Since January 2Clix has suffered a “severe downturn in sales” that cost the company about $750,000 over six months, according to the 2Clix complaint, which was filed in the Supreme Court of Queensland. (All currency amounts are in US dollars.)
Here we have the holy grail of quantification of the word of mouth! The marketers of the world rejoice! Not quite. The good news is that the impact can be significant and lasting. Started by a few comments by ‘unimportant’ people. This is a power of sorts, although not yet harnessed. It can be amplified by more tools and understanding of what’s going on. Similar to blogs capturing, networking and scaling the conversations that people have always had, and similar to social networks connecting people through their profiles and relationships, there are ways to do this to our interactions with businesses and markets. Preferably without silos, lock-ins and closed platforms.
It often seems to be that people forget the power starts from the individual. It is not merely about scale and aggregation. I am reminded of Doc’s post Power to the person, which strongly resonates, for obvious reasons. 
On the way to the airport this morning, my wife and I were talking about one of the big easily-defaulted misunderstandings of the VRM concept: that power for people only comes in numbers, in aggregation. The problem is with the word “only”. Power needs to start with the individual. In a pure VRM context, it’s about my relationship with FaceBook, or Peets Coffee, or United Airlines, or the corner cleaners.
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