Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The way that companies handle customer communication has changed dramatically in recent years. Prior to the World Wide Web, the only way for a customer to contact you was by phone or direct mail.

Today, new channels have emerged and as consumers become more tech savvy, businesses are now finding themselves engaging with their customers through a wide range of digital platforms, such as web forms, email, self-service, forums and social media networks.

The biggest challenge to serving your customers in several communication channels is response time. Customers demand immediate service and slow response times of “within 24 hours” are no longer acceptable....

We all know how important consumer reviews can be to clients, especially those in the publishing, service and retail fields. For that reason, we were taken aback by a new study demonstrating how easily the reviews that authors and businesses work so hard to earn can be manipulated.

In short, online critics behave like sheep: the first and most prominent reviews drive the herd’s behavior, lending an inordinate amount of power to these first-touch “influencers” (who may or may not be legitimate critics).It seems the wisdom of the masses isn’t as pure as we’d like to think.

Researchers for Science magazine conducted an extensive experiment by measuring the public’s reaction to more than 300,000 reviews over a five-month period. Some of the reviews had been manipulated by the researchers while others had not....