There has been a few discussions surrounding my post about the terrible customer service I had received from my local bank in Anderson, IN: Independent Federal Credit Union. You can read the original post at: An Example of Terrible Customer Service: IFCU.
Ontario Emperor over at Mroontemp (dot) com has a great post talking about the value of businesses living the way of their tag-line or mission statement. The post:
When the messaging doesn’t agree with the actions – Independent Federal Credit Union of Anderson, Indiana
After reading Ontario’s post, I started thinking about the value of businesses following the conversations and messaging being discussed about them on the Internet. What finally sent me over the edge to write a post is the fact that Ontario and myself have the top stops on Google searches about IFCU.
Let me restate because I don’t want this to be forgotten. We wrote two posts about bad customer service and have the top spots in the following google searches in TWO DAYS:
IFCU Anderson, IN, bad experience IFCU, experience at IFCU, and customer service IFCU.
Now, whether or not you agree with the fact that people are going to be searching online for the following terms isn’t the point. Many small businesses have not taken the necessary steps to start monitoring their content and name online.
I don’t care if you don’t agree or believe in Social Media as a promotion tool. You should be paying attention to the conversations being developed and whether or not you are part of that conversation. You cannot afford to ignore the Web 2.0 world anymore.
Independent Federal Credit Union has not made strides to monitor their presence online. If they were taking proactive steps, Ontario and myself would have comments on our blog.
Small Business Owners should learn from IFCU’s mistakes and take steps to add a social media strategy into their PR or Marketing plans.
You could choose to follow your current model and NOT monitor the Internet. Go ahead and ignore it completely. If that is the case, do me a favor and dust off that resume (or retire) because you are being ignorant.
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It’s not just the small businesses. Silicon Alley Insider has a story about something that Mike Blumenthal demonstrated. Blumental, noting that anyone could modify a Google Maps entry, modified the listing for a business and reclassified it as an escort service. The business, incidentally, was a suburban Seattle software company named Microsoft. So large businesses aren’t succeeding at brand monitoring either.
I totally agree with you on this.
Small businesses need to listen and engage their customers to find out what they want. Especially since small business don’t have big budgets to spend on focus groups.
We’re trying to solve this problem by letting small businesses know what their customers want by allowing small business receive and reply to feedback.