Social media have brought brands some great things — increased awareness, sales, and a direct communication channel with their customers. But that latter benefit is sometimes a curse.
Because when things go wrong, customers are happy to use that channel to complain — sometimes fiercely.
The going wisdom has been for brands under fire to respond — to reply to comments and reviews, thanking the customer for feedback, explaining policy rationale, or sometimes apologizing.
But is that the right approach?
Are we then publicizing a problem that other customers may not have even known about?
The Academic Study
That's what Ali Golmohammadi set out to study. He is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He and his colleagues recently published a study called “Complaint Publicization in Social Media.”
Our podcast host Tod Maffin spoke with him earlier this week, and he mentioned that he decided to study this after seeing someone complain on Twitter about a brand that sold picture-hanging adhesive tabs:
Dr. Golmohammadi: When the brand responded to that complaint, the complaint — along with the firm's response — moved to the Twitter page of the brand and it was co-located with a tweet that promoted their product.
On Twitter when you post a tweet, let's say you complain about the brand, all your followers would be exposed to that complaint tweet — for an average person it could be less than 1000 individuals. But as soon as the brand responds to that complaint, the complaint, along with the brand's response, would be posted with and appear on the Twitter handle of the brand.
For large brands, that could be public exposure visibility to more than millions of potential audience.
We call this phenomena “firm induced complaint publicity.” Basically, by responding to the complaint it increases the visibility of the complaint.
Their full conversation went into detail on exactly HOW to reply to negative feedback specifically on Twitter… whether you should use a separate twitter account for your brand to handle customer feedback… and much more.
That full interview is on our podcast's Premium Feed.
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