Is Consumer Blogging a Big Bad Headache?
12 May, 2008
Faisal I. Farooqui, Founder and CEO, MouthShut.comThe other day, a friend recounted an interesting childhood memory. His father had purchased a washing machine which conked off a few months later. The service centre folks took ages in registering the complaint and even longer coming home for repairs. His mother was livid, not so much with the company but more so with her husband for buying such a “bad” product. This was the case in most homes. People would fume at their spouses for making wrong shopping decisions. Ironically, the ire was hardly ever directed at the errant companies and lethargic service centers. For a long time, manufacturers of goods and providers of service took the consumer for granted and were happy doling out products and services as long as the consumer accepted them, without even a token of respect of his opinion.
Recently, there was a major goof-up on my friend’s airline ticket which he had purchased from a major travel portal. He went online and wrote a review about his experience. A few days later, the travel portal’s Customer Service Manager got in touch with him and resolved his problem. This anecdote not only reveals a major change in consumer attitude but also a shift in focus. .
My friend is an inveterate blogger. He goes to a restaurant and writes a review on it, he buys a cell phone he offers his unbiased opinion on it. There are millions of bloggers like him across the globe, writing product-based blogs on sites like MouthShut.com and Epinions.com. These “reviewers” have their own audience who believe in their experiences and are subsequently affected.
People were always talking but with the advent and emergence of the Internet as a powerful medium, consumers across the world have begun to interact, share experiences and exchange views. Large virtual communities voice in unison their opinions about products and services and millions more out there listen. These opinions today wield the power to make and probably destroy brand reputations. Without doubt, the future belongs to the Internet and this burgeoning breed of Bloggers or reviewers. Fortunately or unfortunately, the consumers are using the Internet more effectively than the brand owners.
Consumers wear their opinions on their sleeves. On MouthShut.com is a consumer who flaunts her credentials with a cracker: “I love to criticize, I love to scream and I love to call a spade just that - a spade. I am not bothered by what you think of me; rather I am bothered if I don’t speak out the truth.” This is the modern consumer, the blogger who is unafraid of reputations and brand size and image. And there are millions like her floating in the virtual space, voicing their opinions and calling a spade a spade.
In this age, when we consider that the consumer is the king, how do brands protect themselves from blogs written by the hard-boiled, honest and at times, virulent consumer?
In my high opinion, there are two ways of going about it. The first and probably the easiest way is to ignore these consumer blogs as a BIG BAD HEADACHE. Reputation be damned.
The second and probably the most effective way is to listen to your customers. Even if you do not treat your customer as king, treat his opinion more reliable than yours since he is the one to have actually gone through the shopping and usage experience...you have just manufactured your product. Notice that when consumers are talking about brands in their “reviews” or “blogs”, there is invaluable insight and feedback. Gone are the days of brand loyalty, it is all about “Quality Loyalty”. So if you do not listen to them now, chances are that your customers might never give you that chance to speak to them again and you would lose him forever and take a few potential ones away too.
Consumer blogging is definitely not a headache. Understanding your customer is your way of saving yourself of an enduring headache – dwindling bottomline. Do not underestimate the Internet and the power it invests in Bloggers. Blogs are here to stay and they are definitely viral in nature. Understand the medium and stand up to the challenge.
I’m sure that by now my friend’s mother must have stopped arguing with her husband for buying a “bad” product and would have taken to product blogging.
Seems like a few ppl who have some problems about mouthshut are here and are howling their hearts hout. Lage raho. Wont make a difference to mouthshut.
Robin...Thanks for sharing the experience. Don't be surprised if you see many more bad reviews on mouthshut in days to come. But that won't have any impact as I said earlier - most of the people have realized the need to discount the reviews on mouthshut.
i dont know why faisal calls mouthshut a blogging platform, it is a review site and not a blogging site. he is showing disrespect to blogging website like wordpress and blogspot.com mouthshut has not brought blogging to the world his article shows as if mouthshut was invented blogging. mouthshut deletes peoples reviews and bloggs dont do it and above all mouthshut revies sucks the quality of content is so pathetic when so many people write and see personal blogs the quality is so good even if a bad review about product on a blog is good to read on mouthshut it is useless even the good points of product look as if bad
I agree with kanupriya that review platforms like mouthshut and admanya are good but the problem is they are very much biased, people bitch about products most of the time and that is surely an act of competitors but there are some instances that happened to me with mouthshut that i would like to iterate.
My company head got email from this guy at mouthshut to open a corporate blog account and they gave some benefits of it and our dept head was intrested in it and gave him sometime after a week and now when we first saw mouthshut for bad reviews on our products there were very few of them but the day when the sales man come all of a sudden their homepage had more than 8-12 bad reviews about our products and their sales man continued to tell us that we need can reply to those bad reviews with the blog tool and when we actually saw the product we instantly came to know that the idea was browwered from fastcompany.com and it was so patetic product that they had to offer they just wanted to mint money out of it by writing bad reviews, we immediately came to know that they themselves write bad review about company product to sell their corporate blog most of the reviews there are fake and we became quite confident about that, then my boss looked at the advertising campaign of sx4 car which was launched on mouthshut and most of the clicks from a single ip address which is surely of mouthshut office our it dept confirmed that the sales mans email had the same ip as the clicks in those ads. also if u write anything truth about mouthshut their admin will delete it. so there is no freedom of speech and the platform they build is useless due to their own and competitors malpractise
there is a lot of abuse by the companies themselves not just competitors also if you want more details about products it is better to visit wordpress or blogger for blogs and individual reviews at least they dont lie and cheat on personal blogs
Robin F.
Hi Faisal,
While I agree that blogging and review sites like mouthshut etc are very powerful tools available with today's consumer and at no cost any organization should under-estimate the power of today's consumer. Its very good that consumers have an open forum to express their views and organizations can't take today's consumers for-granted. But I think there is also a major flip side to it. Of late I have heard of and experienced many instances where competitors are mis-utilizing this tool to the best of their advantage. Isn't it true that there are some crazy organizations who've hired professional to write negative pages about their competitors? Well, I guess there is a need of some check on such forums, for e.g., a customer blogging negatively about some service should definitely provide the customer no./id w.r.to that service so that their authenticity can be established.
I too agree with you sunil that mouthshut no longer matters it is a dying a company and people dont care about how others feel about products. for buyers it is more important to buy what they want. if all my friends have a santro and talk good about it does not mean i will also buy santro i will go for nano even though people dont like it that much but what matters to me is i like it
mouthshut is uttermost useless and slowest website on planet, they send so many spam email to members and i always click on spam in my gmail because they never stop after repeated mails to support, they will ask you to watch dekhona.com or they ask you to install alexa toolbar. i truly feel they suck and infact they are the only people who write reviews. you can go and search for members on mouthshut search like a or bb etc you will instantaly know how many junk user they are have.
one of my friend did a campaign on their website for advertising and his campaign didnt get more than 100 clicks even though it was on prime location for a month and when same type of campaign was done on rediff he got thousands of clicks i think only mouthshut employees write reviews rate them and faisal writes on alootechie about his useless crap
please check this out..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7zmK3Qve3c
the problem is of the complete reverse swinging of the pendulum - earlier as the process of writing a letter was cumbersome and the company could sort it without involving a million people, companies were able to solve problem. Today even a competitor can write a negative commment - there is no way to know whether the comment in genuine.
online reputation management is becoming a major issue - all brands need to appoint a person just to make sure if someone is writing a negative comment about their company
Faisal,
The picture you have tried to project that before mouthshut consumers had no avenue to vent their complaints about products is incorrect. The only difference is in earlier days, instead of keyboard you had to use pen and paper to write directly to the company and the customer complaints were taken care of.
There is no doubt that understanding your customers is critical for existence but ranting about every possible product / service has become a hobby for some. The changing trend is people have realized the (lack of) authenticity of rants and are learning to discount most uncalled biased cribs. If XYZ Company sells millions of washing machine, while making a purchase decision should I look at 999,998 happy customers or should my decision be influenced by those two unsatisfied souls?
On multiple occasions, I have had my complaints taken care of by the top management of real big companies - all this without any mouthshut.
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