The handling of comments and user reviews around your brand or product still comes up in conversation with clients today, as we create their digital content strategies and medium vehicles.  Lucky for us, we have had the pleasure of working with clients who get it and understand the importance of transparency and every user comment, even the negative ones.  It hasn’t always been like this however.  The issue over openness used to pain newspapers and some of them still refuse to open up commenting on their properties today.  But with the rise and power of social media, and crowd-sourcing effectiveness, the voice of the customer and the review process, should by now be a part of your company DNA.  Social Networks and review agents, as they should, make it easy for users to express their honest feedback, regarding the products and the services they are using, and if you, as the product and service owner are acting in accordance with the new rules of the social Web, you would have found a way to handle these instances. With this being said, we were forwarded an article today, from someone complaining that many of us still assume we can put it (product, project, brand, etc…) out there and never have to weather a single storm.  The story that boiled their blood, goes like this, Telsa Motors, the folks who make the Telsa Roadster, announced that they were going to sue BBC’s Top Gear, for giving them a poor review.  There are a few things fundamentally wrong with this, the main being, could this quake the professional and unbiased review properties, making them skittish about what they publish.  If this ends up being the case, it would shed the sense of genuineness and honesty that many of these professional review agents have been classed with.  [As an aside, I have heard of people questioning the validity of some of the professional review sites, thinking that they could be biased.  The Top Fear conundrum proves their validity and this could work in their favour].

As a business thought leader and or a product manager, we have to be aware of the fact that not everyone is going to like what we create or worse yet, what we stand for – and that’s ok.  Where we come out looking like ‘rock stars’ is when we listen to the feedback/reviews and address them – without fear, as some of them could be right and some could be completely inaccurate and based on emotion only.  Either way, the comment or concern is being addressed and this is another form of good corporate responsibility.

Given the Tesla kafuffle, we could not close this post with out providing our thoughts on corporate readiness and the concept around corporate nakedness, in this day and age.  Whether you are embarking on a crowd-sourcing campaign that has you investigating solutions for your product or brand, or even just applying the basics - operating on the social Web, the pointers below will aid you in ensuring you are built to ‘weather the storm’, so they say:

Corporate Readiness: when you know that whatever you release to the public will attract response, ask yourself if you are ready to accept the responses you will get.  The many uses of social media today makes it inevitable that your concepts and product may be challenged, but if you are honest and recognize the worth of your customer or a potential customer, you will be accepting. Think of this as your massive focus group, which consists of the entire World Wide Web.  You can quantify the cost when you take a look at what you pay for instructor led focus group sessions, market to market.  Making sense now?  Corporate Readiness also applies to having an appetite to act on and institute the viable ideas received from the public and there is definitely no harm in that, if it does not alter the brand or the fundamental product.  Imagine if you took the time to acknowledge customer feedback and showed them the end result that was born out of their taking the time to communicate with you.  You would create brand loyalists for life.

Ensure the Resources Are in Place: are there brand advocates in your organization who are trained in handling customer feedback, both good and bad?  Have you outlined the process around responses, time to respond and then the offline follow up activity that needs to occur, to properly handle honest user and public feedback?

Openness: as hard as this may be, your address, if above board, of the queries laced with negative sentiment can be a testament to your brands honest approach to consumer relations.  This will only build trust and a genuineness around your brand and with so many options for consumers today, within the same vertical market, often the purchasing or subscribing deciding factor is how they ‘feel’ about the brand.  In essence, how the brand will take care of them during their life-cycle.

In the sense of our own openness and transparency, there is some convincing talk that there were claims made about the vehicle, which were not completely accurate, but I guess that will be hashed out in the courts, if this case even gets there.