In my previous article (Using
Forums To Improve Customer Relationship Management)
I covered the learning/information aspect of forums,
as well as how you can use forums to positively impact
your lead generation efforts and customer relationship
management initiatives. Unfortunately, forums can also
have a dark side - in that they can seriously impact
your other forms of marketing if you choose to ignore
or abuse them.
The negative impacts forums can have on your marketing efforts
are in part, the flip-side of the positive actions I recommended
you take:
* Dissatisfied Customers Voice Their Complaints
Aggrieved customers who are web-savvy can damage your reputation
with a few postings stating their dissatisfaction.
If these are isolated incidents, your satisfied customers
will often come to your defence, which should offset the
negative comments, and may even earn you some unexpected
positive publicity.
However, if others also start empathising with them, and
provide feedback of similar incidents of poor service or
product quality, your market reputation will suffer. There's
not much point in merely increasing your sales efforts. You
need to improve your product quality, and also improve your
customer relationship management and service.
* People Recommend Alternative Products To Yours
Questions are sometimes asked in forums regarding which
product or service is best for a particular business need.
While customers may not be at odds with you, if your product
fails to keep abreast with the competition, your customers
will not continue to recommend you. In fact, postings about
other products could cause a customer retention nightmare.
* You Display Your Lack of Professionalism
The quality of your postings - regular poor spelling, grammar,
lousy sentence structure, and posts in poor taste can significantly
downgrade readers' impressions of you. Infrequent typos are
not a big issue, but business-promoting posts that show a
consistent disregard to quality could give your prospects
some clue as to how you approach the rest of your business.
* Your Postings Reveal Flaws In Your Personality
Some forum members seem to forget that snide or intolerant
postings can be viewed by a large audience in the forum.
These postings can also linger for quite some time as well
as get unwanted negative publicity in the forums (members
use the posting as an example of how not to behave on the
forum).
Your testy or ill-conceived comments can often be seen by
non-members. If the forum has been spidered by the search
engines. web searchers can also stumble across these postings.
If they are carrying out market research or due diligence
on you and your products, you can probably kiss those prospects
goodbye.
A recent incident where my wife Gill asked me to investigate
an emailed 'business opportunity' illustrates the negative
impact a couple of forum postings can have.
Gill was reluctant to surrender her contact details to get
more information without knowing a little more about what
the opportunity was all about, so she asked me to see if
I could find out more details. The email address gave away
the website, which was a mini-site with a compelling sales
letter. I did my standard Google trick of 'website name'
+ 'scam', and found several forum postings. One posting stated
interest in the site/opportunity, and what the poster wanted
to know was whether it was legitimate, or merely a scam.
The first response was from the website owner. Rather than
providing some reassurances, emphasizing guarantees and refund
policies, or even testimonials from satisfied customers,
he started berating his prospect for not contacting him directly
(rather silly, as the enquiry wanted to get impartial feedback,
not another sales pitch).
A forum member tried to smooth things over by stating that
all the prospect was doing was due diligence - which was
his right. The website owner then started attacking this
member. At this point several other forum members - several
of whom were actually interested in the advertised opportunity
- all posted that they had seen enough to decide to have
nothing to do with this irritable individual.
Forums can be a useful addition to your marketing toolkit.
You do, however, need to avoid some marketing minefields.
Used intelligently, they can help with both lead generation
and customer relationship management. Abuse them, or use
them carelessly, and they will drive away prospects and customers.
© 2005 Intellinova (Pty) Ltd. - All Rights Reserved
This article may be reprinted, provided it is published in
its entirety, includes the author bio information, and all
links remain active.
For the past 20 years, Jeff Walters has transformed raw
data into profit-producing strategic information in various
sectors - banking, insurance, gambling, medical, government.
He has lead several data-to-information projects: ABC Costing,
analytical CRM, datamart development, and Balanced Scorecard.
Want to convert your raw data into strategic assets? Contact
Jeff Walters via: http://www.IntelliNova.com,
or http://www.SystematicDirectMarketing.com
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