Online Chatter: Buckle up and listen
There is so much online buzzing going around today.
Twitter, Face book, Digg, Delicious, My Space; everyone seems to be out there with full arsenal. Now all of a sudden, all the denizens of this planet (at least ones who have internet and a computer) have got voice that they can beam through endlessly over the net. And most importantly people are listening to each other.
So forget about any social site; any major retailer, who is selling online, has comments section associated with most of its products, where people can actually write their real world experiences. This has become the de facto standard by which end users form their opinion about a certain product or service, and it takes a little amount of time for any bad print to get amplified by certain notches and become the talk of the town.
Bad news indeed travels fast. It's all the more bad, if that bad news is indeed a canard, but by the time the realization dawns, the damage has already been done. And God forbid, if this negative bit of publicity has a shard of truth to it, then at least for some time, one has to bear the brunt of vox populi.
Hence it is imperative for any organization, to listen to social quips. Almost all the major organizations, are online on Face book, Twitter (Infosys is live telecasting its quarterly result on twitter tomorrow), and are indeed trying to form an opinion, based on what is talked about them.
Starbucks has a site which is totally devoted to listening to new ideas from its customers, and they do a darn good job of listening to its customers and implementing their ideas (MyStarbucksIdea.com).
Dell, pioneer in laptop customization, has its own site to do idea storming, and they take their feed from online chatter as well.
Nestle has recently been on the opposite side, wherein Greenpeace activists questioned their palm oil's supplier sustainability credentials (Today any company worth its salt has to have the green banner on its sleeve, and sustainability is the new mantra that has to be recited, sometimes as a marketing panacea).
Nestle quickly dropped the tainted supplier. But by then the damage had been done, and all Nestle could do was to douse the smoldering fire, that had gutted its image.
How does this impact any retailer?
· First, demand sensing has a whole new variable in the equation, the social chatter. All the planned demand might pent out in a jiffy, if people forsake any brand, because of negative publicity, which consumers are doing with alarming alacrity. CEO's dashboard will suddenly be full of reds, if demand for a given product evaporates almost overnight.
· Secondly, the organization will have to scout for a new downstream supplier, throwing a spanner in well oiled machinery of downstream replenishment of raw materials. Now Nestle has to search for a new supplier of palm oil, which can whet its huge appetite of palm oil, that too in such a short period of time, without interrupting its normal operations. It has to be very cautious now, as they don't want the lighting to strike twice.
· Thirdly, a brand once decimated is very difficult to recover and resuscitate. Toyota is a good example where it will take some time for the end users to repose their faith. And it all started when issues about Toyota's vehicles reached a crescendo on online quibbling. Toyota facing such a massive wrath of the drivers for the first time, could not get its act together at the right time, and had to pay the penalty by closing down its production lines for a week. If they had listened to the online bunkum when it had still not gained a critical mass, it would have saved Toyota from this ignominy.
A stitch in time saves nine. Better listen, bootstrap and act, before people come knocking at your door. Have your eyes and ears strapped online. This might save your company a pile of cash.
