What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [8]
Your worst customer is your best friend
Now let’s live out your worst nightmare—the day a blogstorm hits you—and see what you can learn from Dell to survive the crisis and emerge the better for it, having built a new relationship with your customers and the public.
Start at Google. Go there now, search for yourself—your company, your brands, even your own name—and find out what people are saying about you. If you haven’t done it already, perform the same search at blog search engines Technorati, Icerocket, and Blogpulse, plus YouTube, Twitter (a blogging platform for short messages) and Facebook (where you may find groups formed for or against your company).
Now respond to people. Don’t rely on an intern or a PR company to make the search and the contact. Do it yourself. Be yourself. Find someone who has a problem. Find out more about the problem by engaging in conversation. Solve it. Learn from it. Then tell people what you learned. You might have had such exchanges over the years via letters, phone calls, and underlings. But now the conversation will occur in public, as will your education. Don’t be frightened. That’s a good thing.
Let’s say you find a customer—call him Angry Jim—who had a problem with your product—call it your eWidget. Jim writes on his blog that he got a lemon and shoddy service. He couldn’t return it. The warranty was no help. He says in choice language that you don’t give a damn about your customers.
Imagine all that Angry Jim could do online. He could complain on his blog and then start a site devoted to your problems—call it fWidget.com. As soon as he posts, a countdown starts as he and his readers wonder how long it will take you to notice and act. Jim may share the record of his interaction with your company, chronicling every phone call—including a log of hold time and what it cost him—and every automated, form-letter email. He can post audio of the calls, complete with repeated recorded reminders that his business matters to you. To spread his word, he will leave comments on related blogs and message boards and in Amazon reviews. He might make a YouTube video mashing up an eWidget commercial with his own message and jingle. If it’s funny, it will spread. He can publish automated lists of other sites that are linking to him; this serves to gather his mob. Next, Jim could mobilize his fellow victims to take pictures of their busted widgets for Flickr. They could form a Facebook group devoted to complaining about eWidgets. When Jim finds an audience, his fWidget.com will rise on Google search results for eWidget. He’s now competing to define your brand. It can’t get worse but it does when a reporter calls asking about fWidget.com. Even if you don’t listen to the conversation about you, reporters and competitors will. If you didn’t think the problem was in the public before, you can be sure it will be now.
So what do you do? Run? Hide? Curse the lout? Sue him? Up your ad spending? Hire PR companies to just do something about this mess? Wait for it to go away? Look up your golden-parachute clause? You could try all that, but it won’t do any good, not anymore. Your customers know where you are; you can’t hide from them. Everything you and your employees do is being watched and made public in an instant. You have one chance to do the right thing, to rescue yourself. What will you do?
If I were you, I’d email Jim. Yes, he said nasty things about your widget. You may think he’s an unreasonable complainer. You may fear that everything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion (and you’d be right). You hate the idea of not being in control of this conversation. But remember: When you hand over control, you start winning.
Tell Jim that you want to understand the problem and fix it and that you’re grateful for his help. He is helping you. He could just as easily have deserted you as a customer. Instead, he’s telling you what went wrong and how