Do you know who is talking about your company?

Do you know where they’re talking about your company?

Do you know what they’re saying about your company?

Do you know why they’re saying it?

Do you know who else is listening?

If you know the answer to each and every one of those questions - Congratulations, because you must have a robust buzz monitoring solution in place - plus keeping tabs on, and most likely participating in, conversations about your company.

But, what if you’re not? Do you know where to start? …and once you find them how do you respond?

Over the last few months, I’ve been an active member in the Mixx community.  Mixx, for those that don’t know, is a social voting network, where members submit articles, and others vote them up or down. The more votes an article gets, the higher the chance it will be seen by more people.  

Over the course of time, I’ve noticed that certain companies, especially - Sprint - frequently has negative posts submitted and voted on, such as:

• Sprint Phone bill goes from astronomical to merely big
• Sprint’s new data card download caps produce apoplexy in customers
• Success Stories: BBB works against Sprint
• Worst company in America: Blue Shield V Sprint
• Operating Challenges and Credit Deterioration at Sprint

One commonality that you’ll notice amongst these posts is that all of those articles were submitted to Mixx by the same user - Allen_mvp.

Allen_mvp is the online handle of Allen Harkleroad who is a former Sprint customer who states that he found out that Sprint had been overcharging his business for over 3 years for services to the tune of over $56,000. As you may imagine, he wasn’t happy about it, so he contacted Sprint. They gave him the runaround one too many times, so he created a website to tell his story - Sprint-Really-Sucks.com.

Not only does he tell his story there, but he’s also branched out to reporting on any Sprint related issues, and asks for any Sprint horror stories from readers. Whatever he finds, he pushes out to different social media channels, such as Mixx, to broaden the reach of his site and to try to make as much noise as possible.

I asked Allen what his goals were, and he told me …

“Well, of course I want them to refund me what they overcharged me and yes, I would like to see them fix their very broken and outsourced customer service. Right now, they outsource much of it to Alorica and I believe this is one of the main reasons why their CS sucks. And yes, I want to warn as many people as is humanly possible.”

He says that he sees in the logs that Sprint does visit his site, and they have contacted him.  But, the contact has been limited to 3 boilerplate emails that state they’re looking into his case and a phone call on May 22nd - with a promise to follow up that apparently hasn’t happened.

Online community wise, there appears to have been no attempt to engage with communities that he’s been posting to, i.e. no comments from Sprint on Mixx.

So, it appears that Sprint is aware of the negative articles and the hit that they’re taking, but they aren’t taking that next step - participating. On the plus side, at least they’re talking to Allen.  But, if they don’t make a real attempt to engage him and resolve his issue, either through refunding what he believes he’s been overcharged, or through some form of compromise, it appears that he’s going to continue to push articles out to social media sites.  He’s even talking about creating Sprint parody videos.

Of course, with a large company, there are many Allen_mvp’s out there.  For example, a search on Sprint Sucks on Google shows over 202,000 results with many stories similar to Allen’s.  So, it may be that Sprint doesn’t have the resources to work on all of the issues or that they are working on those that have higher visibility than his story. (Allen’s site is relatively new and as yet isn’t ranking in the top 30 for Sprint Sucks.)

What about your company?  Are you monitoring “your company sucks” in your RSS?   Are you looking at what’s being said about you on different social networks?  Are you going back and checking out follow up comments?  Are you identifying the influencers and engaging them?  If not, why not?

Filed under: Reputation Management, Social Marketing on Monday, June 9th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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