Big Talking Shop

Forget Twitter; Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Last fall, executives from Oriental Trading Co. read a product review from a woman planning her autumn wedding complaining that her order of fall leaves didn’t look anything like the picture on the website. The execs went straight to the warehouse, pulled the product and compared for themselves. She was right — it didn’t look the same. The explanation: The company had recently switched vendors for that particular product, and the new vendor’s version wasn’t up to snuff. So the company pulled it.

While the first lesson of the story is that you never want to disappoint a bride, the more important one is that marketers are learning to listen. And for all the ink spilled on the importance of Twitter and Facebook as feedback and customer-service channels, there’s another social-media tool marketers are increasingly finding useful, not just as an online-shopping tool but as an internal, culturally changing consumer-criticism channel: the humble product review.

If your working through a project looking at the relative value of customer services and profit these are good background books.
Amazon.co.uk Widgets

An interesting book may change your mind on the way markets move.
Amazon.co.uk Widgets

In these times when a great number of people globally have either or are about to be out of work its interesting to spare a thought for those that are left.
Publish articles on traders sat on their own where normally they would be fighting for space lead you to conclude that if companies are [...]

Feb 09, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) —

The current business environment consists of a struggling economy, in which customer acquisition is challenging, while consumers are increasingly sharing information on the web. These trends have created an opportunity for contact centers to utilize social networking websites to improve customer service at a low cost, by integrating Web 2.0 technologies with other communication technologies.

The new meaning of ‘multichannel contact center’

There has always been a link between the relative happiness of employees and the relative hapiness of the customers they serve.
Talking through this today it was interesting to try and indentify those companies that fall in that bracket.
Would appreciate your comments on companies you think fall into this bracket.
Thanks in advance