To respond or not to respond? Considerations for ORM

UPC, a Dutch trendsetter in the field of ORM, has definite ideas about when the company should or should not respond. UPC only addresses facts and not emotions. This means they sometimes refrain from getting involved in discussions. UPC’s Director of Corporate Communications Ronald van der Aart indicates as much in an article by Floor van Riet: ‘It’s useless to respond to “opinions, past experiences or vague insinuations”.’ Moreover, employees of UPC’s webcare team stick as much as possible to discussing content in their responses in order not to get dragged into discussions. They always do this openly as representatives of UPC and never anonymously or personally.

There are various articles containing these and other valuable insights on how to handle webcare and online reputation management. Articles worth consulting include Webcare: imago versterken & effectief reageren op klachten or Vuistregels voor webcare en webrelations. These tips are primarily of a practical nature and based on hands-on experience and common sense. In his article entitled Orm: meer dan brandjes blussen, Matthijs van Gaalen presents a model covering of various aspects of ORM that helps you to determine your policy: an active or a passive approach for both positive or negative situations.

But how do you assess, as an ORM or webcare moderator, what kind of an impact a particular message will have on your brand? And is it always wise to steer away from emotional discussions – the number one rule of thumb in PR? Because negative word of mouth has a far greater impact than positive word of mouth. The question is whether the present generation of PR specialists and trainers are fully at home in the field of online communications. In view of the responses by many communications professionals who participated in the CommOnline conference in May 2009, it seems there is still much ground to be gained.

The consumer’s motive as a guiding principle

Pierre Berthon and Colin Campbell perhaps offer a solid starting point for preparing guidelines for ORM or webcare. They monitored consumers who make their own commercials (see the magazine Merk en Reputatie, Volume 15, No. 1, 2009). They believe that you have to be aware of the motives of these handymen. Then you have to look at how the fake commercial affects the company or brand: does it reinforce the brand or undermine it? Only then can you determine the damage that’s been done and formulate an appropriate response.

Three reasons for consumers to make videos

1. Intrinsic pleasure: people who make videos love technology and creating things. What they create is less important.
2. Self-promotion: people who make videos want to attract attention. The attention, for example, of potential employers, or they do it to spruce up their portfolio.
3. Alter perceptions: people who make videos aim to have a particular impact on their audience and want to influence opinions.

Berthon and Campbell believe that this motive is important for the response you ultimately make. In addition, it’s important to determine what kind of an impact the commercial will have on the brand. Does the message undermine the brand or does it reinforce it, and does the commercial resemble the original commercial or not? If you are able to determine this, you’ll be in a position to choose a targeted and effective response or action.

Responding to fake commercials

According to Berthon and Campbell, there are four kinds of responses to fake commercials to choose from:

• Rejection: you respond in a passive, negative way. You do voice criticism, but you do not take any action. This is the response many companies opt for. The advantage is that, as a company, you can adopt a wait-and-see attitude. The disadvantage is that you risk being seen as indecisive or incompetent by consumers or competitors. 
• Challenge: you respond in an active, negative way. You actively play down the effects of the messages, if need be with legal action. The advantage is that you establish the image of being a company that is to be reckoned with and who will not shy away from challenging potentially serious brand damage. The disadvantage is loss of face in the event that you lose a lawsuit, for example, or the missed opportunity to establish contact with consumers and learn from them.
• Encouragement: you respond in a positive, verbal way. However, this type of response is passive, as you take no further action.
• Facilitation: you respond in a positive, active way. You encourage or facilitate. The advantage is that you create goodwill and receive imaginative ideas and show that you are taking a clear position.

To illustrate their point, Berthon and Campbell cite several ways in which producers react to consumer responses or give them a stage that encourages their response. One of the examples they mention is Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, which generated a great deal of free publicity, partly thanks to the parodies of the commercials.  

Parody of a Dove commercial

One of the parodies of Dove’s Real Beauty commercial on YouTube was visited more than 147,000 times and received 189 responses. This fake commercial’s message was: ‘Help us raise money: buy our products.’ In the ensuing discussion, consumers asked themselves what Unilever’s motive was. The company gained a great deal of publicity as a result of these videos – Unilever did not respond to this, however. The messages are included in the following timeline: http://www.dipity.com

Unilever did, however, stimulate consumer initiatives, such as the Dove Reality Diaries, in which users can record their experiences.

In order to accurately assess how to best respond to consumer videos as a company, Berthon and Campbell present the following overview:

Responding to self-made commercials – Pierre Berthon and Colin Campbell

Responding to online discussions

How can you translate insights about fake commercials into online discussions? In such cases, you’ll have to ask yourself what the motives are for launching a forum, posting a response or sending a tweet. Essentially, the same motives are more or less at play. Moreover, I think consumers have another additional, important motive for online discussions: help or support. There may be different motives at play simultaneously as well.

Motives for online discussions

• Intrinsic pleasure / the need to share experiences or express satisfaction or dissatisfaction (on existing forums or self-initiated ones, such as the following from 2007: www.nooitmeeroxxio.nl and www.nsstress.nl or by means of Twitter).
• Self-promotion: customers may present good ideas for service or product improvement (venturing, co-creation or crowd sourcing). For example, open-source platforms of IT enterprises such as Linux or GX. Apple employed user feedback for the development of iTunes and iPod.
• Alter perceptions: positive or negative appreciation of the brand, the company, one of the managers or employees, product or service (stemming from a particular conviction).
• An appeal for a solution, help or support from experts or fellow-sufferers. www.chelloo.com, www.dsbramp.nl.

Other factors in determining your response

If you consider the possible responses, aside from rejecting, challenging, encouraging and facilitating, you can also choose to not or not yet respond (ignore). The potential disadvantage here is that the perceptions of the company or its people might become even more negative.

Also important is the impact of the person making the statement (the authority of this person and the medium). The number of people who support the statement can also be of influence – but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. One individual’s comment can cause more damage than that of a whole crowd of people.

Looking at what the discussion specifically focuses on can also yield interesting information: does it concern the brand, the company, people from the company, services or products, or the quality of the service it provides? Determine first whether or not to respond, and which arguments you will use, and, equally important, who responds. Criticizing Gerrit Zalm as Chairman of the Board of ABN AMRO/Fortis requires a different approach than an issue such as arranging a mortgage.

So much for theory: let’s see what happens in practice.

Telfort, a practical example: dashboard with quality services

Telfort’s webcare team, set up in April 2009, runs a blog where customers can express their opinions about the company. The team also indicates which improvements Telfort had implemented in May 2009 as a result of customer responses (http://blogs.telfort.nl/).

Bloggers, in turn, responded by saying they appreciated the initiative, but they would like to see more concrete results, a kind of dashboard that can be published externally. Valuable feedback for Telfort, and the webcare team gave them a deserved response.

Figure: Response by Telfort to visitors of its blog

Oxxio, a practical example: don’t respond

In any case, rule number one in online reputation management is that you monitor what is being said or written about you. Based on that, you’ll be able to determine what response or action to take. Take www.nooitmeeroxxio.nl, for example. In 2007, a dissatisfied consumer launched this forum, aiming to ‘warn people and companies against contacting Oxxio or asking this energy supplier for a quotation.’ The founder of this forum essentially wanted to change perceptions of this company. The people that responded had the same aim in mind or were looking for support. Oxxio never responded to this forum, didn’t acknowledge the issue or ignored it. At first sight, this doesn’t seem harmful: the forum contained four posts in the month of July and one in November of the same year. In retrospect the whole affair was brief. The maximum amount of responses was four. In terms of impact, the damage should have been limited. The real problem, though, is that this forum is in sixth place on the natural search results on Google.

Although Oxxio never responded on this forum, in my opinion the company would be wise to ensure that other content is optimized in a better way. It’s especially problematic when another initiative takes off, such as the Oxxio Nightmares forum on www.onze-stem.nl (which is more recent and links to nooitmeeroxxio.nl). And so these two forums reinforce each other’s existence. And the annoying thing is it all remains visible on the internet. 

Figure: Two consumer forums aimed against Oxxio

Dealing in practice with online discussions seems somewhat more complicated than dealing with fake commercials. For example, there are more factors involved in determining an appropriate response. The Telfort example shows how important it is to encourage responses and demonstrate what you are doing with them (although according to some blog visitors there’s still room for improvement). The Oxxio example shows that ignoring things is sometimes an acceptable option, but you have to be alert to potential side effects. 

Learnings

• Discover what motives an author might have for his/her message and determine whether the response/discussion undermines or reinforces the brand, and to what extent (by determining the relationship between the message and the brand).
• Be careful to accurately determine the specific target of the discussion: the brand, the company, people within the company, products or service quality. You can gear your response to this as well and determine who would be best suited to provide the response.
• Find out what the specific situation is: the authority of the author, the source and perhaps also the size of the group posting the messages.
• Realize what the impact might be if you do not respond. That, too, can have a negative influence on your reputation.
• Bear in mind that the last response on the blog does not mean the end of the discussion. New responses can always surface, so it’s a good idea to show that you are there and that you’re involved in online discussions, as demonstrated by Telfort.

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