Turning lurkers or unhappy customers into fans. Stroke of genius or swindle ?

March 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : what’s a fan on facebook ? Someone who likes a product or a brand of course. Are we wure ? When, to be able to use this channel to get information or the solution to a problem with the product people have to become fan, the system is biased. So the only question is to know what one think of a system that turns lurkers or unhappy customers into fans despite of them. Clever trick or false advertising ?

What company is not trying to recruit as many fans as possible for its Facebook page ? No one is quite sure of the valuation of a fan (while the acquisition cost is well known) but fans are needed. Some will buy more, some will share the essage…fans can have several role what makes it difficult to know what their contribution to the business is. That said, they have an intrinsic value for any business ; if between two competitors there is a big difference on the number of fans it must mean something.

I’ve already discussed the relativity of the concept of community membership. That’s the same with fans. And I’m close to think that it’s even worse.

What can make me go on the page of a brand toward which I’m neutral ? Get informations, maybe in order to buy the product later, know them better before thinking of sending them my CV…

In some extreme cases, I may want (rather…need) to meet the brand on its page because I’m not happy with their product, service, and would like explanations or a fix. Why not, after all, since they say “we do customer service on Facebook”.

But it’s often impossible to read of write anything without being fan. Not a serious issue after all…only a button to click. But the mechanism looks like swindle :” you want to complain, you need information, so tell the world you’re a fan first and then only we’ll talk”. Like if, before going to the customer service desk in any store, customers had to run in the street shouting “I love [the name of the store]“.

Ok, sometimes it’s only an impression. If some brands keep their contents only for their fans, in many case people only need to know were to click to get rid of the welcome page and access the content without become fans. But Mrs Anybody is not aware of that and thinks that only way to access the page and get rid of the welcome page is to click on “like”.

We can also un-fan after having done what we needed…but who’ll think about doing so ?. And  how many neutral and unhappy people did have to demonstrate their “fan-ness” to access the most basic level of information ? Sometimes I feel I’m deceiving my network when I become a fan only to have a look…

Swindle ? If you think that when I become fan while I’m only looking for information or I’m unhappy with the brand may make my network think I recommend the brand in question…there’s a real point here.

Ok…I’m quibbling. It’s all about wording and ethic. And who cares about that today ?

 

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Even in downturns, human capital has to be protected

February 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Because they didn’t have the time (or the will) to make the structural decisions that would help to face a downturn, companies often react by acting on the easiest adjustment variables :

• Cuts in bugets

• investments putt offs

• employees lay offs.

It makes it possible to attend to the most urgent things first even if I think it only defers what’s unavoidable. The focus is on cost and not on revenue, and  costs can’t be endlessly cut except if you want to turn a company into an emplty shell. Any cut expenditure won’t be able to be cut again the next quarter or the next year because it won’t exist anymore.

I’m one on those who think that the goal of any enterprise is to make money and that thinking only in terms of expenses only makes it possible for directors to act like firemen. But it’s easier to cut costs instead of trying to find an innovative way to drive incomes.

Whatever, this kind of policy also have dramatically bad effects for the future.

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Filed Under: Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Disintermediarization : how a 2.0 practice can help against credit crunch

October 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Enterprise 2.0 is enterprise before being 2.0 and social tools are tools before being social. It’s very important to understand that anything 2.0 is, before all, characterized by a vision of interactions between people before being about the use of such or such tools. And a relevant vision can help bringing an old legacy business back to youth without changing its purposes nor its main characteristics.

The current economic situation shows us how once “what can’t be changed” faces a major crisis despite a presupposed infallibility, it’s possible to makes things change since the “we’ve always done things this way so there’s no other way” reflex is not relevant anymore. But it needs a real paradigm shift.

Banks don’t have money anymore ? They don’t trust people ? They don’t lend anymore ? They don’t even trust other ? Add to that the fact people don’t trust banks anymore too and you get all the required elements for a credit cruch.

So, strangely, everything that was only about mathematics, based on foresseable nature of things, cartesian risk scoring, showed its limits and more and more attention is paid to what was ignored : people, trust and what underlies all that, that’s to say the existence of links, of interpersonnal exchanges that make trust possible. Perhaps the beginning of an answer for those for are convinced that discussions and networkings had no business value.

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Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,