The Trust Test

It’s inevitable: Whether you are the in-house person working on social media or a consulting “expert”, sooner or later someone in the organization is going to say “but what if they say something negative about our product/company on our blog/Facebook wall?”   And it becomes clear that they haven’t quite grasped what makes social media different from other marketing.   It’s exactly the possibility that someone can criticize a company or product that gives social media its power.   Participating in social media gives a company more credibility because they are seen as saying “yes, we want to hear what you have to say good or bad and we’ll engage you in a conversation about it.”  This transparency is what gives consumers confidence.   After years and years of one-way marketing, where the company controlled the conversation and all the reviews they shared were glowing, the public has become jaded. Now they really only trust what they hear from peers.  Even industry media coverage and reviews have become suspect because of the potential influence of advertising revenue on editorial.

So I guess the big question for a company getting into social media is, how much do you trust your product or brand?  If you feel your company produces a high quality product and strives to provide good service and ethical business operations, then why not open up the conversation?  Yes there are cranks on the internet and people who might write something inappropriate on your wall just for kicks, but those are pretty easily seen for what they are and most services have ways of removing posts and banning such users.   Other negative comments that appear genuine and are expressed in an appropriate way offer opportunities for a couple of positive things to happen.   Your company can show its responsiveness and caring by having a conversation with the customer and identifying and solving their problem, or maybe even better, other fans/supporters can respond either to provide specific positive examples of why they like your product/service or to help the user solve their problem.

You’ve probably experienced this at trade shows, someone comes to the booth and starts to ask the marketing intern standing there a question or complain about an issue they may have had, just as the kid starts to get that deer in the headlights look another customer standing in the booth jumps in and starts to help, explaining that they had the same problem and then they found out they hadn’t read the manual and they had the wrong processor or whatever, and often more than one person will chime in.  People like to be helpful and they like to show how smart they are; this helps to drive social media.

If the idea of having a negative message appear on your blog or Facebook profile seems scary to folks in your company.  How about negative comments appearing somewhere else that you never see, or a discussion group dedicated to how much your company sucks? Now that’s scary! And it’s the risk that companies who refuse to engage authentically with their customers run.