While some organizations are trying to flip the funnel and give a megaphone to their happiest customers (leveraging their positive word of mouth) more are obsessed with silencing the dissenters.
Just as asymmetrical warfare has turned our geopolitical system upside down, the same thing is happening in the marketing world. While it’s tempting to spend all your time stamping out the little enemies, the architecture of the system favors a strategy of embracing and leveraging your happy constituents instead.
Trying to squash criticism is not only pointless but also counter-productive. All you wind up doing is infuriating the blogosphere and attracting even more negative criticism that will spread even further and faster. As the Borg put it “Resistance is futile”. The only thing that can really be done if a company wishes to avoid being eviscerated in the blogosphere is to accept the criticism and address it in a constructive manner.
Technorati Tags: blogosphere, borg, criticism, seth godin
What do you think?