Friday 22 January 2010
SideWiki – is it Open Warfare? Asks Stuart Wilkin
There’s been a bit of a scare in the PR industry, ever since Google launched its Sidewiki technology at the end of last year. The application allows members of the public to post a comment in a browser window directly next to a brand’s website. And so marketing and PR professionals face another challenge as they strive to manage the brand reputation of their clients.
So far things have been relatively quiet, but how long before open warfare breaks out. There are some rules. The targeted website can flag illegal or abusive content using a ‘Report Abuse’ button. But other than that you can’t edit or delete users’ opinions.
Brand managers have used social media to promote their businesses, but now things are anything but one way. And subversive comments directly next to a company’s website could dilute the site’s credibility and, in the worst case, drive customers away.
There may be some amusing banter appearing next to football clubs’ websites in due course, but is this new application rendering PR agencies a little less potent? You can use it to you advantage by persuading happy customers to post warm comments.
The long term impact may be just a reminder that you always need your business to have substance behind the spinning words. If you have a good product and give your customers excellent service they’ll buy from you anyway. Concentrate on that.
And if you interact regularly with your customers, surely new and nimble threats like this will be less of a worry. After all, websites in 2010 should be about two way communication. You don’t need to be scared of people telling you what they think.
But if we all stoop to the temptation of posting comments on competitors’ websites then we will be hurtling headlong into the Wild West. And then watch the PR people run for cover!
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Tuesday 12 January 2010
It's snow joke
With this bad weather preventing access to work places accross the UK it struck me how badly prepared many businesses are for these types of situations. Many business will have had no access to their voice based communications systems when the were excluded from their offices.
Luckily for us we decided to practice what we preach & recently installed our web based IVR system on our non geographic number. Our engineers were able to "dial in" from their mobile phones & receive calls from the office number as if they were sat in the office. All this was done from the internet with no access to the office. This also gives us redundancy should our phone system or phones lines have an outage.
In a lot of cases business are using a single circuit & are relying on geographic numbers to provide voice communications into their organisation. This is a frightening prospect - despite email being the most popular form of communication voice is still hugely important and should therefore require some form of continuity.
Harry Edwards,
Managing Director
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