I was reading through my Business Insider alerts the other night and this article (McKinsey Article link) about the positive correlation between "negative buzz" and a decline in sales to the tune of 8%... that is a significant amount, no matter how you look at it.
Like Sham, I do not have a Facebook profile either. I do dabble on LinkedIn and I now write this Blog. That pretty much sums up my personal Internet presence... As a consumer/user I always felt that Facebook (and MySpace and Friendster before it) was "a place where good, useful minutes went to die" and that paying for a "Community Manager" was about as useful as a match under water. However, under a business mindset, I kept trying to focus on the immense potential of accessing a virtual arena with close to a billion people interacting that I can navigate at the speed of light and make my brand and products known to whoever I wanted to target. I was always looking for an upside and felt that figuring out a way to monetize my business presence in a social network and -probably because I am not a user - I always had a hard time figuring out what excuse I could come up with to interrupt someone's conversation or paste some ad on someone's wall...
In any case, this article opened up my mind to the other side of that coin... a bad rep will also travel at the speed of light and, in light of this article, has significant potential for damage to sales! The problem is that what people "learn" - and they learn at Warp Speed - on the internet affects their offline actions. This is making me re-think my posture on "Community Managers" altogether. How much is a good community manager worth? Apparently up to 8% of the CLV of new customers!
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