TMobile and Online Reputation Monitoring

Online monitoring is a hot new (well, maybe not new, but definitely hot) topic for corporations interested in protecting their brand. Trademark and copyright lawyers make their dough protecting trademark infringement, but a new class of cyber-customer is taking corporate names in vain, and unlike the websites of the past, they're having more success in stinging companies.

We all remember the websites that appeared in the late 90's titled: www.(bigcompany)sucks.com. It was just the latest attempt by consumers to express their outrage at the lifeless customer service and poor quality of a company's products. These days, with search engines and blogs and Consumer Generated Media, those complaints are top-of-the-mind to anyone searching your brand.

Church of the Customer has one today, as a disgruntled T-Mobile customer pays to put a giant decal sticker on the back of their car warning customers off of T-Mobile. The picture came from Matt Certo, a blogger who saw the car parked in his company's parking lot, and Voila! It's all over the internet.

Ben and Jackie then point us to a Google search of "TMobile Sucks," which shows a long list of disgruntled people complaining about the company.

People on the fringes do fringe work but if I were at T-Mobile, I would consider the effort of this customer vigilante a leading indicator of bigger problems to start working on.

That's a fair statement, but I wonder if the problem is T-mobile. One of my blogging friends in employment is Dennis Smith, a recruitng blogger for T-Mobile , and because I respect him, I felt the need to defend T-mobile.

Let's take a look at the searches for some other wireless carriers.
Sprint Sucks - 1,030,000 results
Cingular Sucks - 565,000 results
Verizon Sucks - 1,370,000 results

Compare this with the 554,000 results for T-Mobile, and you have a clear winner? Well, a lot of this depends on the type of customer, the number of subscribers, and whether or not the subscriber is the kind to get indexed on Google or another search engine. Also, this kind of tracking isn't exactly accurate, as Jim Durbin Sucks gets 74,000 results, and while that may be true, I don't think 74,000 people hate me that much. Even Mom, Baseball and Apple Pie Sucks gets 281,000 results.

Corporations can't handle this level of complaint, but there is something to be said for generating positive results, and each of these companies, when you just type their name into a search engine, gets positive results.

So why do online monitoring? Because you never know what is being said, and you may find yourself rushing to respond weeks after a blogstorm has hit your company. The Comcast video of the tech sleeping on the couch didn't convince people that Comcast was terrible, but it provided an outlet to complain about cable in general.

In the case of the T-Mobile decal, the company may suffer from a general dislike of cellular companies, even if they have the lowest number of complaints. It's not about fairness, it's about being involved in conversations with customers before they have the opportunity to turn you company into the leading story on the six o'clock news.

Some bright people write about online monitoring. Nathan Gilliatt lists different ways for company to begin the process. Jeremiah the Web Strategist lists some technical ways to monitor your name, a very helpful list if you are going to do it yourself.

Some companies like Intelliseek also offer monitoring services (at a hefty cost). And then of course there are blogging and market research experts {cough* Durbin Media *cough} who can track your company online and also provide the tools to address the issues using blogs, social networks, and direct communication.

It's not something you have to do - but waiting until your company gets caught in the crossfire is too late.