Companies beware: the Internet is here. Gone are the days that the underdog can be ignored by big business. If anyone complained about a crappy product or disservice, it was a quiet, ineffectual whisper. Who would listen? Maybe a few friends. Maybe their friends.
No more.
You hate a product, you tell hundreds, thousands, even millions: you write a negative review on Amazon, Buy.com, or any other of the hundreds of popular mail-order sites utilizing a review feature in their retail pages. If more people agree with you, the strength of your voice will be added to the other negative complaints. People hear enough of the negative reviews, from tens of people, they will start to see a pattern. They will question their decision to buy the product.
Maybe they _won't_ buy the product.
The Internet is now being used as one big customer forum to voice complaints as well as compliments, the only difference now is that you can add more than just your real life friends' opinions to the mix. Millions can be informed because positive news travels quickly, and negative news travels _more quickly_.
It is interesting how big companies are now using this technology to stay in touch with their customers. Viral marketing to me is even more engaging and captivating than product reviews on retail sites, at least to me. Infecting news travels even faster. There are good examples (Cloverfield, Blair Witch Project) just as there are bad ones *cough* alliwantforxmasisapsp... *cough*
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3 comments:
Fascinating stuff. As a consumer we get sold shoddy goods and services and in the pre-connected internet world days we had to duke it out with the Cust. Service department. Now- we can tell the world about our poor treatment and actually impact a product or service's sales. It's enormously powerful and puts the srength back in the consumer's hands. And now we're getting the postive news pushed to us- so they are trying to use the connectivity to their client base to their advantage.
I don't quite grasp viral marketing-but I'm going to research it based on this post.
I can't agree with you more.If internet has done nothing it has got us as CONSUMERS more closer to meaningful information and this in turn has made our decision making better than before. the fact that news spreads like a virus and its takes no more than seconds for, good and ugly,thoughts to travel has enabled us to become more actively involved when doing business.
It's interesting how viral campaigns can fail so spectacularly, especially when the customer base realizes that they've been had. For instance, look at the fallout from the Marie Digby viral YouTube campaign - a very talented singer who was set up by her record company has now been lambasted by her would-be fans. Not to mention how much heat Sony took over the lame PSP ads featuring those kids rapping (poorly).
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