Could you cope with an online Wispa-ing campaign?
Jinfo Blog

29th October 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

What do a Cadbury’s Wispa bar and Dell computers have in common? Answer: they’ve both had to change their business practices as a result of pressure from bloggers. In Cadbury’s case, the pressure was positive; it was online petitioning that induced the company to reintroduce its Wispa chocolate bar. For Dell, on the other hand, online consumer campaigning was a far from pleasant experience – to the extent that market researchers concluded the firm had ‘sustained long-term damage to its brand image’. If you’re responsible for information flows in a big corporate or, say, a large bank in the aftermath of the Northern Rock affair, you’ll be aware that blogs are now a major source of potentially serious consumer power. In fact, it’s not even new any more; the BBC was talking about shoppers using blogs for bargains as long ago as 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4282614.stm and the disastrous Dell affair http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4879160.stm took place more than 18 months ago. One thing you certainly can’t do is assume that, because it’s unofficial, social networking activity is going to have less influence on your business than, say, analysts’ reports. Citing research by the search engine Technorati, Australian Competition & Consumer Commission Chairman Graeme Samuel http://digbig.com/4twhp suggests that users are less and less likely to distinguish a blog from mainstream media sites, making traditional media organisations’ assumptions about users trusting known brands look ‘a little shaky’. So if you haven’t prepared yourself for the power of consumer blogging yet, it’s certainly time to do so. A new Concept Report from Jupiter Research, User-Generated Content: Demographic and Behavioral Profile of Consumers and Creators http://www.jup.com/bin/item.pl/research:concept/1231/id=99789/ may help you to understand the kind of opponents you’re up against and just how many of them there can be. But surely, just like the dot.coms a few years back, the social networking bubble will burst eventually, won’t it, as early adopters move on to the next innovation? Well – sort of. A new Datamonitor report, The Future of Social Networking: Understanding Market Strategic and Technological Developments http://digbig.com/4twhm – released at almost exactly the same moment as Microsoft’s announcement that it had acquired a $240 million stake in Facebook – predicts that social networking’s explosive growth will level out within five years. As the market becomes more crowded it will become harder for such sites to remain independent, so acquisition and consolidation are the likely outcome. Having learned the lessons of the dot.com debacle, investors are also likely to be ‘repelled’ by overconfidence, Datamonitor continues. Nevertheless, a ‘levelling out’ is not a burst; potent consumer pressure through social networking is here to stay, and corporate information professionals must be ready to deal with it.

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