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Maintaining Your Operation’s Online Image buzzword “Buzz” isthesea bigdays, because
David Lively owner The Lively Merchant
20
MArCH 2009
consumers are buzzing in ways that were unheard of just five years ago. Forget the back fence. Today they share their opinions and experiences on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter. What this means to you is that managing your customer satisfaction department just became a global endeavor. When Harvard sophomore Matt Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, more than half of his fellow students registered for the service within the first month. Now open to anyone over the age of 13, Facebook currently has 150 million users worldwide, including me. Within days of creating my Facebook account I was invited to become virtual “friends” with a diverse crowd of former high school classmates, business associates and even my mother-in-law, who uses it to share videos of her grandkids. Soon I could see what movies my widening circle of friends were watching, what causes they supported and see pictures of their kids. One person complained about a defective gift, another warned about high levels of lead in thrift-shop finds. MySpace has 76.4 million users just in the U.S. while LinkedIn, a business-oriented network for professionals, has more than 30
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million registered users in 150 industries. Twitter is a micro-blogging network that limits posts to 140 characters — just enough to answer the ubiquitous question, “What are you doing?” What your customer is doing is telling her friends, be they actual or virtual, “what she is doing” at work, at home and out on the town with text, pictures and videos. She actually has a tendency to share a little too much, so much so that Webster’s New World Dictionary named “overshare” its 2008 Word of the Year: overshare (verb): to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval. This tendency to overshare has also begun to have a profound impact on the retail home furnishing business because customers can complain to their heart’s content around the world and there is very little you can do about it. She can rant on her own personal profile page or on sites like yelp.com, “The fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great — and not so great — in your local area. It’s about real people giving their honest and personal opinions on everything from restaurants and spas to coffee shops and bars.” A quick search on yelp.com for “furniture” reviews in San Francisco yielded the following results on yelp.com: Contact WHFA at www.WHFA.org or (800) 422-3778.