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Getting Dirty with Customers on the Web

Ever since the Internet became the cool kid on the block, the business world has struggled mightily with how to make use of the darned thing. Since the 1990s, many company’s Internet “attitudes” have gone through something similar to the five stages of coping with grief:

1. Denial – “We don’t need to have a website.”

2. Anger – “Do you know how much work it’ll be to sell this on the web?”

3. Bargaining – “What if we just put up a homepage with our phone # and email address?”

4. Depression – “We spent how much on our website? Just for the hosting?”

5. Acceptance – “Our URL needs to be printed in a larger typeface.”

Perhaps the biggest part of the problem businesses have with the web is the uncontrollably open nature of Internet communication. There are no filters, no editors, no FCC standards, but it’s this yin/yang nature of truly free speech that gives the Internet its powerbase. To loosely paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, “If the Internet has seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of message boards.”

In the early days of the post-DARPA Internet, the computer network was mostly comprised of bulletin boards where like-minded geeks would debate everything under the sun, from the dollar value of an original Star Wars action figure to the modern-day relevancy of 14th century papal decrees. But the major thing that happens naturally in this environment is what plagues us today: unsupervised peer-to-peer sharing of customer experiences.

As a company executive, this aspect of the Internet should drive you crazy. On the one hand, you love having people discuss your company and its products; word of mouth still reigns supreme as the king of all marketing. On the other hand, what if what’s said is not flattering? What if a competitor goes into a public forum and spreads lies about you? What if someone says something negative that is actually the truth? The Internet shorthand for this is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt), which is like a super-immune information virus that attacks without reason.

This problem registers at approximately 4.1 on the Andrew Grove five point corporate paranoia scale. It may be true that even negative publicity is good publicity, but if you search for information on your company and come across a host of customer testimonials about a particular product’s quality problems, you would be right in thinking such openness can’t be good for reaching sales goals. As a company, you have two choices on how to deal with this: be cold or be cooperative.

The short-cut, easy way out is to be cold, to treat the problem as if it doesn’t exist and do nothing to encourage or acknowledge it. Many online discussions quickly devolve into childish, illogical rantings, which can make addressing them proactively a no-win slippery slope. The faceless nature of the medium complicates this further as such anonymity can embolden people to criticize you on a wider range of issues, including poor product quality, unfair labor practices, manufacturing in China—almost everything is fair game on the Internet (just ask Martha Stewart).

A bolder stance, and one that requires much perseverance, is to be cooperative and actively participate in these online discussions. While doing so may force you to “get dirty” from the typically undesirable “defensive” position, if your prose is eloquent and your arguments logical, you can successfully debunk your online critics, give confidence to your supporters and even turn around previous detractors. After all, human reality is 10% truth and 90% spin, so the coin of public opinion will land face up or down depending on whose spin creates a stronger vacuum.

Below are some links to an online discussion that perfectly illustrates how this scenario plays out in the real world. The subject is Unicorn, a UK-based manufacturer of darts equipment and the biggest name in the sport, similar to Callaway for golf or Brunswick in bowling. These links show what happened when the company’s Managing Director decided to engage customers through a public forum.

On the website of the top professional darts player (who is sponsored by Unicorn), there was a post by a Unicorn customer lamenting a quality problem with his equipment. As happens on every BBS of its type on the planet, the thread, labeled “Unicorn going downhill?”, devolved into a gripe session where people grouped together with similar product complaints and folks making specious connections between the company’s business practices and even accusing them of being greedy and fleecing customers as a result.

The highlight of these threads is the participation by Edward Lowy, Managing Director of the Unicorn family business. Over several posts, you’ll see how Mr. Lowy eloquently and diplomatically defuses a heated discussion with calm and honest explanations on the inner workings of his company and its practices. By doing this with skill, he effectively corrected errors and misstatements made by forum members, bluntly defended his company against accusations of ignoring quality or breaches of ethics and clearly explained technical points of his company’s manufacturing processes, which was the source of many misunderstandings.

Perhaps the best thing Mr. Lowy did with his approach was he took everyone seriously and spent time making sure he addressed every single specific point people were discussing related to his company, and there were a LOT of them. He even showed a wry sense of humor, which is always appreciated on public forums, but more importantly humanized his online persona whereas the majority of executives who would try such a thing would likely make efforts to be as stiff and politically correct as possible. He was even able to handle one situation when someone accused him of being an imposter and others accusing Unicorn of publicly lying. The result was many of the complainers were turned around completely and people got much more educated and informed about the business side of an avocation they love.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this sort of grass roots PR is easy or even something you should do yourself. Unicorn is a relatively small company and Mr. Lowy is a nephew in the family business, so they have more flexibility than much larger and/or publicly traded companies. Still, the manner in which he composed his posts can teach a lot of people about the appropriate way to speak with customers in an open forum and how to disclose insights to them that can have a greater effect than any high dollar marketing campaign.

Mr. Lowy, we commend you.

Related Links:

• Original Complaint Post about Unicorn products, “Unicorn Going Downhill?”

• The Unicorn Managing Director defends his company
   

Any reaction to this article? Send your feedback to gregg@roundtable.com

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Link: http://www.endcorporateconstipation.com/

This issue’s web review takes us to “EndCorporateConstipation.com,” an effort by innovation consulting firm, Venture2, to publish brief anecdotes of insane corporate policies, procedures and attitudes, as well as inspirational bits on those rare events when things work right. These types of sites can offer a really useful cathartic outlet for the times when bureaucracy and corporate paranoia make your brain scream with overflowing cognitive dissonance. Reading through it reminds us of when Don Reinertsen tells his story of how an engineering manager could make unsupervised product design decisions with multi-million dollar impact to the company, but was required to have a signature to release a $2 box of pencils from the supply room. The site is brand new and in need of new posts, so we encourage you to send them your juciest, head scratching story of corporate cuckooness.