Are You Ready For the ULTRA Review?
October 06, 2009 by Dan Huss
There is an adage in marketing that if someone has a good experience with your brand they will tell a single person, but if someone has a bad experience with your brand they will tell 10 people. I have bad news marketers, those 10 people just turned into a million.
Yesterday, Monday October 6, 2009 at 2:34 pm Pacific Standard Time, my daily dose of random news came to me the only way that it does nowadays, through the people I follow on Twitter. I was just about to click on a link from @GuyKawasaki when I happened to notice that T-Mobile was a trending topic. Normally, that would not interest me in the least, however it caught my attention as over the last couple of days I have not had internet service on my T-Mobile Sidekick and was curious to see if it was related. So I clicked on the link to take me to tweets about T-Mobile. What I saw shocked me.
What I witnessed was the birth of the ULTRA review. A real-time beat down from unhappy customers. Yes, the T-Mobile trending was related to the loss of internet I had experienced and the public was angry. At the height of their mob mentality, twitterers, with metaphorical torches, lit up T-Mobile with no shortage of harsh words.
Negative Hash Tags were created to help propagate the abuse. What’s worse, the few people that were attempting to defend T-Mobile all had to use the negative hash tag, only prolonging the beat-down!
To drive the point home: I witnessed people exclaim that they had just called and canceled their service with T-Mobile.
This ULTRA REVIEW has some important implications.
This is not your mothers’ bad review. Bad reviews have existed on the internet since its inception* However, previously users had to search for the reviews they were interested in (i.e. T – Mobile reviews). Now, just as I don’t find the news that I read anymore as it finds me, this series of terrible reviews** found me.
*Estimate
**I should note that the T-Mobile twitter thread is likely much longer than any series of traditional bad reviews
Deciding on how to control your digital damage. The implications for the creation of Digital PR like we haven’t seen are huge. Important questions that need to be asked are: How do I manage the speed and ferocity of negative publicity that are now possible because of Twitter? Do I have a plan to intercede? Or can I only sit idle and manage the aftermath?
You can’t afford to give your customers time to get mad. You never want your customers mad at you, because they will tell people. Customers don’t need to talk to the media to be heard, anymore. That’s changed. It is very easy for an individual to reach thousands, and even millions of other individuals.
T-mobile’s service has been down for three days. Had T-Mobile resolved this problem within a matter of hours, a day, or at this point even two days, this massacre would have been resolved.
A perfect analogy happened a few weeks back when Google’s Gmail service went down. Google not only had the problem resolved in a matter of hours, but then put on a clinic on how to apologize. I left the situation with even more respect for Google.
Wisdom of the crowd + Unvarnished reviews = Ultra Review. What is at the heart of why this is frighteningly powerful? Likely if you are reading this, I don’t need to tell you how much impact user recommendations have on product purchase. It’s understood that a friend recommending a product is much more powerful than any marketing message originating from a company.
Further, there is an idea (at least in America) that there is wisdom in the masses. In other words, large numbers of people all sharing a similar thought are not likely to be wrong.
Twitter has combined these two devices, and I witnessed “the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station.” All in all, record numbers of people giving candid thoughts on a product = POWER.
Dan Huss Sales Solution Associate
Read more from the Web Trends category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
Comments
Sebastian Roberts Oct 06, 2009 at 10:54am
What is frightening as a marketer, is T-Mobile's complete lack of presence in the discussion. This is a big mistake. Ignoring it won't make it go away. More likely, ignoring it will add fuel to the fire. Ultimately, real-time communications tools like Twitter add a factor of volatility to what I call the "Information Marketplace". Like in any market, emotion and group-think heighten the peaks and deepen the valleys. Marketers must take these situations seriously. Perhaps the most interesting implication of this phenomenon is that it reveals that strong branding can be a double-edged sword. Would people feel as strongly if they weren't so entrenched in the brand? If our mobile technology wasn't so tied to our identities, would we make such dramatic claims or take the actions implied by them? T-Mobile's biggest mistake in this case would be a failure to recognize that this situation is their responsibility. There is no victim here except the consumer. If you cultivate a strong brand identity and fail to fulfill the promise of that brand, you'll suffer the consequences. The Google response you mentioned is a classic PR move. Fess up, apologize, promise to do everything you can to not repeat the mistake. Simple. Effective. It's hard to attack someone who is begging your forgiveness. But where T-Mobile should take the biggest hint from Google, is that Google was engaged from the outset of the problem. They recognized the mistake and followed through on the brand promise. If we love a brand, we can forgive it. But we liked to be asked first.
amit Oct 06, 2009 at 10:13am
great article Huss!! this is good for consumers in all areas since it will force big companies to stay on their toes..
Post new comment