In the past, your product/service’s reputation lay mostly in the hands of the media. If someone had a bad experience, provided they weren’t the media, they were unlikely to spread that around to the masses.

With the rise of the social web, the voice of the individual has become much stronger, many people who would otherwise be pretty unpopular, have thousands of followers on Twitter or thousands of friends on Facebook, and this gives them immense potential to evangelise or damage your brand image for a massive quantity of people. This is why services such as Facebook and Twitter matter to your brand.

You should be monitoring all mentions of your brand and promptly get in touch with both those who are raving about it and those who are ranting. A bit of attention, whether it’s a coupon or an additional bit of support, can turn a person who is moderately happy into a fanboy or evangelist for your brand – take Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream for an example. They often give details of how to get a free scoop of ice cream to their Facebook following (of which there is over 1 million people), if only 1% (10,000 people) go for a free scoop and half of that figure (5,000) post about how great it is on Facebook/Twitter, they have the potential to reach another 2.5 million potential customers! (assuming each person has around 500 followers/friends)

Similarly, you can no longer afford for any customer to have a bad experience, some people have hundreds of thousands of friends on Facebook/Twitter, and you probably don’t know who they are. Take Jason Calacanis for example, you may not have heard of him, he is the founder of some technology blogs, he has ~100,000 followers on Twitter. That’s 100,000 people who’ve consciously decided that what he has to say is important to them. If he has a bad experience, he is going to message about it, and then that’s 100,000 people who are unlikely to buy your product/service. Okay, so it’s a rare case that people have 100,000 followers, but even if it’s a few hundred people, can you really be affording to kill off 100 potential customers each time you don’t meet a customer’s expections?

So what can you do to prevent this?

People using the web are used to getting feedback immediately, and that’s why it’s important you have these avenues in place to allow people to get in contact as soon as they have an issue. Aside from trawling Twitter and Facebook to find dissatisfied customers and doing what it takes to make them satisfied, you can look into services such as Get Satisfaction. which takes your support online and provides functionality such as searching so repeat issues don’t require repeat use of your time.

Get ahead of the game – becoming pre-emptive.

Little bits of added value are more important now than ever. Things that in the past would be forgotten 30 minutes later, are still forgotten, but are likely to be passed on, because it’s so convenient for people – anything that can bring a smile to someone’s face can bring a status update or tweet in your favour, a few digital words that potentially mean thousands of pounds worth of business!

Image Credit: Ben & Jerrys Half Baked Frozen Yogurt @ Flickr