Or more specifically, why you don’t want to piss off Chris Brogan. Chris had a bad experience with Bank of America and wrote this post. The fact that he ranted about it is not special, the power of his rant is.
Chris is a star of the social media set. His blog counts 11,452 RSS readers in FeedBurner - which means the total readership of his on-line column is likely half again larger. There are some professional magazines that would be quite pleased to have numbers that high. I have not counted the total number of posts on his site, but he has been at it since March 2004. Averaging two to three posts a day for several years means his site has more pages than many corporate sites - possibly even more than the Bank of America. Chris is also heavily linked, meaning other people with equally powerful blogs point to his. All these pages and links gives Chris’ site a lot of “google juice” or the power to be found in the top results of Google searches.
Within a few hours of posting, a long list (47 at the time I wrote this) comments were added to the post and I’m sure a lot of other bloggers, like me, will post other comments that link back to his post dramatically expanding the total number of readers. Within days, Google will be ranking the post quite high in searches for Bank of America. Word will get around.
The lesson is that there is no longer a single customer out there. Everyone is connected. Its a collective. If you piss one off, the others will know about it. Undoing this damage is very hard to do.
On the other hand, if you surprise and delight your customers, they will write about that too and word will get around just as fast.
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