Listening to all of your available channels
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. Continue reading
