If you work in marketing, chances are you’ve heard this cautionary tale: “customers who had an awful experience will share their negative incident with an average of 12 other people. In turn, each of those 12 people will mention the occurrence to six others.” This statistic was culled from a website published in August 2009 (Just two years ago). Today, due to the amount of people using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, I feel confident that those numbers have skyrocketed. For example, if I tell my 1,000 “friends” on Facebook about a negative experience I had in dealing with a company, according to this stat, collectively they would go on to tell another 6,000 people; totaling 7,000 people who heard about my experience. Clearly these are rough estimates, but my point is that a person’s voice has far more reachnow than it did a few years ago-- and companies not only need to monitor what’s being said about them, but embrace it!
Most companies use Social Media as a method of monitoring negative comments. What if your company used it to create positive word-of-mouth on the internet? By speaking to your customers via Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites, thousands of people will potentially see that communication. So, instead of thousands of people reading about a bad experience, they’ll read about their friends’ or family’s great experiences with your company.
