Originally published in the Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal
In today’s fast-changing multimedia world, it goes without saying that the rules of the marketing game have changed. Consumers are not so much interested in being talked to through television or print ads as they are interested in interacting with businesses they patronize — and with each other.
Traditional advertising still has its place and word of mouth is king, but where some businesses are missing the boat is in realizing if they don’t have a solid presence online, their customers will create a brand for them, whether those businesses like it or not. And it may not always be a positive one, or one that aligns with their vision.
It’s especially easy for local businesses to ignore their online presence and rely solely on their offline reputation and word of mouth. The other mistake is forgetting that social media is only one of the tools in the digital toolkit and it’s not as successful on its own. And while social media may not even be beneficial for all companies, it is still important to understand how it affects the online brand.
In a recent study called “The Company Behind the Brand: The Reputation We Trust,” leading public relations firm Weber Shandwick found that of the 1,375 consumers polled, 69 percent discussed with others how they feel about a product they purchased, and 55 percent discussed the company’s customer service. The same study found that 88 percent of people were influenced by what people say about the company (both online and offline), 83 percent were influenced by online reviews, and only 56 percent were influenced by advertising.
SEO marketing company BrightLocal.com polled more than 1,100 U.S consumers (as well as nearly 900 from U.K.) and found that 70 percent have used the Internet to locate a local business and 67 percent searched for online reviews of local businesses. Interestingly enough, the majority — 69 percent — also were as likely to trust online reviews as personal recommendations.
Obviously a lot more goes into decision making than numbers and statistics (which, as researchers know, can be a fickle thing in the first place), but a couple of questions to consider include: What happens when customers can’t find your business online? And how can you build a good reputation when you are MIA online and don’t know what people think about you in the first place?
To answer the first question, you only need to look as far as the marketing giant Coca-Cola. As the story goes, when one of its fans couldn’t find the company on Facebook, he enlisted the help of a friend and created a page himself. Coca-Cola, to its credit, ran with the idea — its now-official page is still largely customer-driven, with a few corporate posts sprinkled among the (feel- good) customer raves.
Sounds like a great story, except that for every one of these successful fan overtakes, there are numerous disaster stories about what happened when a company lost control of its messages — and brand — through social media or other online means. Just ask McDonalds, whose recent #McDStories hashtag on Twitter started out innocently enough: to promote its fresh produce. By the time the Twitter mob was done with it, the #McDStories stream turned into a long list of 140-character horror stories about the fast food giant.
True, you can’t control those kinds of runaway trains any more than you can control reviews by customers on sites such as Yelp or Google Places. And in the digital world, you have to relinquish a certain amount of control over your “message” to your market to be authentic (the buzz word du jour in social media) — which means a lot more dialogue that you can’t completely control.
But if you have no online presence other than maybe a static website or a completely user-generated Yelp page, you’re giving your customers, virtually speaking, a piece of paper and crayons and letting them run loose with your poster. Without any help, how close will the image they create come to your brand?
The other aspect that weighs into the online brand building process is search engine rankings — back to the idea that the majority of consumers will look at a business online first. Social media presence, blogs, new website content, presence on heavyweight sites like Google Places and so on all add up to how easy your business is to find online — and consequently how successfully it will bring in customers (and dollars) in.
This doesn’t even get into the topic of other bad news like squatted domains or user names, fake profiles, complaint sites and so on. The more seriously you take your online brand, however, the easier those problems are to address. Just remember, the beauty and the curse of the online environment is its constant flux — which means your job is never done. The days when you could create a bunch of beautiful brochures and rest easy are long, long gone.