A pre-Christmas survey, though one still worth noting is the one carried out by Convergys Corp, which says that a single bad tweet or Facebook comment can cost you 30 customers.

Apparently Convergys found out that bad reviews or comments on social networks reach on average the ears and eyes of 45 people.   Out of these, 2/3 would consider not giving their custom to the brand being slated, without even necessarily re-tweeting or building on the negative comment.   In other words, they are gone and without any kind of warning to you.

According to Frank Sherlock of Convergys, these kind of web posts lead to “silent attrition where customers switch companies without complaining directly.”

Which is not to say that some can’t be highly vocal, the company surveyed 2000 UK consumers and found that 1/3 had posted negative brand experiences online.    This is similar to a Euro RSCG study earlier in the year, which identified a trend of ‘cyberdisinhibition‘, where people are more likely to complain from the anonymity (and low hassle factor) of their PC.

This and other items are in the weekly ‘Rabbit Feed’ – more details here!

Image – Life as art

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More good stuff from Norwegian brand strategist Helge Tenno – this presentation on seven actionable marketing trends, namely:

1- People talk, they don’t want to be interrupted, but they do want their conversations to be ignited and more valuable

2- People don’t share stuff because they notice it, they share stuff because its valuable

3 – Our activities need to give the participant the opportunity to choose how and where to participate (the thing I find brands struggle with the most)

4 – People will gladly spend a minute of their day composing and publishing their own version of the brand story, but they won’t give five seconds of their time to listen to the company tell their version of it

5 – People are more valuable owning and using your product than thinking about buying it.  Limiting marketing to just the “process” of purchasing limits your time with people to an extremely small part of their universe

6 – “People will watch a TV programme once, maybe twice, but they will play chess a hundred or maybe a thousand times” (Kevin Slavin)

7 – Imagination: It’s not the product or category that defines a company’s ability to connect and grow with its audience, it’s its ability to imagine something remarkable inside what to others seems like a lifeless and boring category.

Helge is offering to create a larger presentation of fifty trends that the wider community can use, if enough people feed back to him via comments or tweets – more details on his blog!

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• Your Reputation Sucks (futurelab.net)
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Now here’s a subject close to my heart, the continued usefulness or otherwise of the age old press release. Publisher Ragan Communications and PollStream carried out a survey in the States, which found that only 49% of PRs think ‘it’s as useful as ever’, while 33% thought it was a ‘necessary evil.’

Ragan’s Lindsey Miller says press releases are becoming ever less useful due to – yep, you guessed it – social media. According to Marketing Charts, Ragan’s take is that communicators are using social media to get around ‘canned’ information and to target and reach journalists. And obviously via Twitter lists is yet another way that can be done.

I guess it all depends what you define a ‘press release.’ Does it really have to follow the conventional standard for it to be classed as one? For example, some companies have started using blog posts in place of standard releases – Twitter is a prime example. It’s something that makes sense in certain circumstances but to my mind, a corporate post is a release of sorts.

Image – Bohman

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