I am really enjoying working on the Oz Experience project at present as everyday so many things come up that just reinforce what I am preaching about selling on the Internet and Web 2.0. The latest involves bad press.

I have talked about this before, particularly in our March article which discusses Creating a Relationship with your Customers; there exists a real risk in the greater social Internet of bad press blowing up in your face. In the case of Oz Experience a customer who travelled earlier this year has created an anti-Oz Experience page in Facebook. After I have read the guys complaint I immediately spotted one inconsistency - he had heard of problems and therefore decided to travel an alternative method. he had not actually experienced any problems. Although I only consult to Oz Experience I was well aware that during the time this guy is talking about they did everything possible to put on more buses and alleviate any backloads. Those customers that were well organised experienced very little problems.

It is interesting to see that there is already a comment to this regard by a customer on this Facebook page. From my point of view it is important that the company address the complaint immediately. I believe that Oz Experience should consider commenting on this guys page saying “hey did you personally experience any problems? and hey, we did have a few overloads due to people changing their minds at the last minute etc - but this is how we have reorganised our routes and bus management to avoid it happening again in the future”.

The important point for the rest of us, however, is that it is vital that you have someone monitoring the social Internet for these types of PR nightmares. Given the positive feedback of customers to this Facebook page it is unlikely that this will manifest itself much further and by monitoring the situation Oz Experience is more than well placed to deal with it quickly, efficiently and turn it into a positive. Can you say this of your business? Are you aware of what people are saying about your business on the Internet?

Just a plug - for those that are interested, Xebidy offers a monthly subscriber service to our Xefeed product which monitors the greater Internet, blogoshphere and media sharing sites for information continually about our clients, manually checking the information and then feeding the good news in an RSS format that can be reused as marketing material on your own site, and feeding bad news directly to you for dealing with quickly.

Tags: Facebook, Oz Experience, Web 2.0, XEFEED

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Opinion, Xebidy clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.