Shake Gently - advertising technology blog

Let us not forget the power of the consumer: The rise of Consumerist.com

One of the sites that I have been tracking for a while and recently added to my RSS feeds is The Consumerist.

If you are in PR and haven’t heard of this site, it would be worthwhile to monitor it on behalf of your clients. There’s no worse way than to have your client contact you about an entry that was made and getting blindsided for an immediate response (this hasn’t happened to myself or the agency, but I’m sure it has happened to many others).

I was reading about a recent computer repair sting in Canada that was posted to the site.

Basically, CBC Marketplace did a hidden camera investigation into computer repair companies and found only 30% were able to correctly diagnose their problem. Ouch. Doesn’t speak well for the companies involved.

It would be interesting to see a calculation of the brand damage for a negative post about your company or clients on the site (or similar sites, for that matter). That page in particular has over 2700 digs with 500+ comments on digg and a sizable number on the CBC site as well. Thats a lot of negative coverage for any brand involved.

Yes, I understand the sting was a little tricky to use as a baseline of all computer service situations since computers, in all honesty, are fairly difficult to diagnose. And, thats part of the reason for the string of comments.

Technorati Tags: computer, repair, service, consumerist.com