Your Brand Could Be Hijacked - Get Ready!

In the good old days, when your company inadvertently disenfranchised a customer by some tacky bit of poor service or poor product performance, there wasn't much they could do.  The really angry customers would simply stop doing business with you.   If you were lucky, an aggravated customer would send a complaint letter or email or make a call to your customer service desk.   Customers like these were providing both incredibly valuable feedback to your business as well as giving you a chance to remedy their problem so they could continue to do business with you.   If you mishandled this golden opportunity, only the disgruntled customer generally knew about it and the worse that could happen is that you lost them as a customer.

In today's world, the downside of creating angry disgruntled poorly-handled customers is much greater.  That's because it's not just between you and them anymore.  Now, customers have the power and the ability to literally inform the world about how poorly your company or one of your brands has performed and how badly your people have responded.  

In today's world, BEWARE THE TECH-SAVVY DISGRUNTLED CUSTOMER!  They can hijack your brand.  They can dominate the Internet conversation about your brand.  All it takes is one really angry and highly motivated tech-savvy brand pirate and your goose could be cooked.

The Internet is the tool.  Anti-brand blogs and text messaging can be powerful but the real brand killer is video.  

Image the following marketing nightmare.   One of your customers records and uses their cell phone to video tape a particularly idiotic and callous encounter between them and someone from your company.   The video (because it's either funny or outrageous) finds its way on to YouTube and then starts showing up on emails and on other social networking sites.  People who may have had similar experiences with your company appear out of the woodwork and jump into the exploding and negative Internet conversation that's happening about your brand.  Your brand is being "flamed."  Are you paying attention?  Are you aware this is even happening?  Are you prepared to do something about it?  Or are you asleep at the switch as millions of dollars of your marketing investment go up in smoke?

Even if you don't experience this type of brand nightmare, there is still an Internet conversation going on about your brand.  It's happening right now.  Are you plugged into it?  Are you tracking it and using it to understand what is being said and thought about your brand?  Are you using it to gain brand insight?

You must recognize and embrace the idea that you are no longer in complete control of your brand.  Viral transmission and re-transmission of messages can propagate negative information FAST.  Is your company ready to deal quickly with information like this that gets out there? Do you have a company blog that you can use as a communication tool to combat this kind of thing?  Do you have a PR response plan ready to implement?  Is your marketing team empowered to respond FAST when these situations occur?

If you don't, you've got a time bomb on your hands.  The clock is ticking.  What are you waiting for?