As I said before the conversation economy preexisted social media. It was based around the telephone. The engine room of this economy – at least as far as the marketing department was concerned – was the call center.
I would suggest then that it doesn’t take much effort to visualise the future of the online conversation economy becoming an online extension of the call center. Indeed it is self-evident that call center operators are in better position to expanded their area of operations into this emerging area of reputation management than advertising agencies.
This is why I think reputation management is more likely to become an expansion opportunity for the direct marketing industry than traditional advertising. Indeed if this opportunity is properly managed by the DM industry (Think Telemarketing) then the current growth in social media marketing on the internet and on the mobile will become little more than an appendix to the extraordinary growth we have seen in DM over the past 20 to 30 years.
If the DM industry has any threats in this space it will come not from the traditional advertising agencies but from the management consultants.
I say this because most of the issues associated with reputation management can be traced back to issues of systemic failure. The tipping point where the organisations policies, procedures and practices touch the customer or the supplier directly and fail to deliver on the promise defined by the Brand. The point where the organisation has to choose between being Agile enough to respond to the challenge and being Optimised (Think: inflexible) in its approach to meeting its customer’s needs.
If it chooses to be rigid in its approach it must apply alternative strategies that will help to reduce the risks associated with failing to respond to the challenge. This is where Reputation Management fits in. It is the fall back position when the system failures to deliver on the promise.
Advertising Agencies Build Brands. Management Consultants Monitor, Measure and Optimize the Performance of People, Workflow and Technology Systems. The Call Center pick ups the gap between the customer’s reality and the corporate promise when these systems fail.
It is therefore logical that Reputation Management is an extension of the business technology system that delivers the service. It is also therefore logical that the management consultants will see Reputation Management to be one of their key domains of expertise going forward. This is why I believe the future architects of David Armano’s Conversational Economy will not be working for the advertising and marketing companies but for the global management consultants.
The problem is of course when reputation management is part of the system it almost inevitably suffers from the same systemic problems that create the initial point of friction between the customer’s exception and the organisation’s ability to respond in an agile way. The result is a type of feedback system that not only fails to respond to the customer’s needs it accelerates the level of frustration the customer has in dealing with the organisation. This feedback loop inevitably leads to a customer meltdown that results in the dreaded viral social media conversation that provides more damning evidence of the organisation’s inability to deliver on its promise. In this context reputation management provides the catalyst that delivers Brand meltdown and the inevitable tarnishing of the reputation online.
I’ve said before the new online advertising paradigm is all about “Browse with us, buy from us“. Unfortunately the paradigm for reputation management hasn’t changed. The reality is you are still only as good as your last F@%&Up! The problem is you now have to respond to the challenge in real-time. (See Tweets shed light on our banking gripes)
This then leads me to what I believe to be the real value of the emerging conversational economy to the global brands.
If the global brands are really interested in learning how to leverage the conversation economy to improve their bottom line they should consider calling upon the wisdom of the crowds to provide ideas and workable solutions to the systemic problems which plague their customer relationships on a daily basis. The crowd sourcing of the process improvement work currently undertaken by high-profile and very expensive management consultants would do more to improve a corporation reputations than any token investment in the conversation economies of Facebook or Twitter (Think: Fan page). After all a customer service experience designed for the customers by the customers has to be significantly better than what laughingly passes for customer service in most organisations today.
Further Reading
- THE TWITTER TAX AND WHAT IT REALLY SAYS ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS – Andrew Grill
Posted on September 14, 2010
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