I have been having fun on my local community forums discussing Virgin Media.
They have desperately oversold their capacity (by about four fold) and, as a result, people who are paying for large bandwidth are getting about 0.03% of what they have paid for in the evenings, when everyone is streaming TV etc.
But they have been able to play everyone along, by giving out lies both about the nature of the problem and when it is going to be fixed. Everyone who has been given a fix date has got a wildly different answer. Some of the dates have passed, others are soon, others are later.
The power of the forums is that the lies and half truths are being shared and published.
Our Residents Associations (who run the Council in Epsom, a unique situation) are now circulating a request to all 30,000 homes in the town asking them to report back any problems.
This has obviously got Virgin Media quite exercised and suddenly they have started doing the pre-installation work.
So community action can be very powerful.
Vendor participation needs to be done carefully.
I have seen successful cases. The company has to assign somebody to do it, whose job it is formally.
The problem is that if the employee writes a load of crap to one person’s email enquiry, probably only that person will see it, but if he writes a load of crap in a forum, thousands will see it. So you have to appoint somebody who is not a d1ckhead like so many people at the customer interface of so many companies are these days. You have to find somebody intelligent, polite and who can write properly.
And that isn’t easy.
For a start, it is a rare combination to find at a salary level coresponding to a customer interface employee who nowadays is in a script monkey call centre and is paid the NMW, plus maybe a little bit. You need somebody with tech knowledge and the pay will be 2x higher. Most companies will begrudge that.
On the big US forums, firms like Garmin have official participation. The people are smart, well spoken, well informed, have a channel to the right people in the company (which is extremely rare these days if you enquire directly; 99% of the time your enquiry stops at the script monkey) but obviously avoid getting into anything controversial.
(The big sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc) will have mfg participation because it is absolutely necessary. Anyway, presence on these is mandatory for a big-retail-name player.)
Their presence usually prevents technical threads degenerating into drivel – because they can post authoritative information.
It would be a farcical if you had a forum with advertising down the sides and the advertiser didn’t participate and allowed misinformed threads to develop. It would be a really cynical outcome – throwing money at a community site so people buy your stuff and allowing it to degenerate into a debate which leads nowhere because of lack of information. Yet that is exactly what happens on every European GA forum.
Smaller companies do use forums for business and we happily allow that here on EuroGA provided that the posters participate usefully in the forum. I am really keen on this and I think that really enhances the site. Obviously, some have sailed close to the line… just plug their product and then vanish for 6 months.
Unfortunately the big players prefer to hide…
Having been on forums since about 1993 the thing I find most perverse is manufacturers not participating in the forum.
You know they read it.
You know their staff is banned from participating – except in the big US ones.
They just sit there and couldn’t care less if their products are discussed and they could have valuable input.
This is different from company to company. Personally I don’t think it is healthy for staff to participate. They would be dragged into “never ending” discussions, distracted from their real work, only to increase their blood pressure above normal healthy levels. Thick skin is a must at least, as well as self discipline. In the kit-industry, with all the companies I have been involved with, they have excellent one to one e-mail and telephone support.
MGL Avionics, have been known to participate, and several one man companies use the forums as their main customer arena. They probably pay some amount for this?
They just sit there and couldn’t care less if their products are discussed and they could have valuable input
That’s not the case with some (successful) companies on Twitter. Try tweeting “@Ocado, your service is brilliant” and see how quickly someone from the company will pick it up and re-tweet it (post the same message from their own account, for the non-Twitter initiated). Likewise, try tweeting “@Ocado is rubbish, all my eggs were broken when they arrived” and see how fast they tweet trying to solve the problem.
Having been on forums since about 1993 the thing I find most perverse is manufacturers not participating in the forum.
You know they read it.
You know their staff is banned from participating – except in the big US ones.
They just sit there and couldn’t care less if their products are discussed and they could have valuable input.
“The only aviation mag I believe to be reasonably truthfull is Aviation Consumer – they carry no advertising.”
That is my conclusion also, although I might say “balanced” instead of “truthful”. I do not think every advertising magazine is untruthful. But Aviation Consumer is currently the only aviation magazine I subscribe to. I actually feel good about supporting – if not PhD work, then fairly well performed evaluations, supposedly free from bias.
I get AOPA Magazine also, but each issue is a heavy pile of paper with only limited interesting information, although some of the writers are quite good. I am a member because I see AOPA do very useful work for GA in Denmark/Europe, but I have asked not to recieve the magazine. So far, without success. I believe the product reports in the magazine are generally more kind to the manufacturers than informative to the readers.
Jan, there is probably a bit of that. After all, at least if their products are being discussed then they are in the minds of their potential buyers. I actually think it’s more the case that some companies are realistic. Pulling your ads from a medium which brings you lots of customers just because that medium allows some of their users to say negative things would be bad for business; where would it end? You’d not be able to advertise anywhere.
Look at how big brands engage with Twitter, despite bad things being said on Twitter about that brand. Should Marks and Spencer not allow their ad to be shown on YouTube because elsewhere on YouTube there are presumably comments saying that M&S are rubbish, given that YouTube puts their ad in front of millions of people for free?
If magazines really do never say anything bad about bad products to protect ad revenue then maybe that’s a lesson their publishers need to learn from the internet and they shouldn’t complain when those ad revenues fall because their readership falls because people don’t want to pay to buy a catalogue every month.
Those advertisers must believe in the adagio of one bespoke airline manager – “there is no such thing as negative publicity, whenever one gets mentioned in the media that is a good thing even if the mention is in negative words” or something to that effect.
The only aviation mag I believe to be reasonably truthfull is Aviation Consumer – they carry no advertising.
That may (or may not) be true, but just because you carry advertising doesn’t mean you must disallow negative comments about products. It might mean that advertisers are disinclined to advertise with you in future if you allow negative comments, but even that isn’t a given. And if your motivation isn’t maximising revenue then that might be absolutely fine. Of course for most magazines revenue is a motivation, but it’s not necessarily for all websites
We are involved with other discussion forums which have a substantial amount of negative comments about some of their advertisers. It doesn’t stop the advertisers advertising though.
The only aviation mag I believe to be reasonably truthfull is Aviation Consumer – they carry no advertising.
