Wednesday 19 November 2008

Testing times for Arjuna

This animation video has been floating around on the web.



Apparently, this is a TV ad made by JWT for Sulekha.com and it has been soft-launched on the Internet "to check people’s reactions to it before releasing it on television,” reports afaqs!

Friday 7 November 2008

Online Reputation Management or Customer Satisfaction?

Last Sunday, I watched on bemused as three executives from Club Mahindra (a holiday timeshare brand) staged a funny pitch (they call it "presentation"). Will spare you the details, but in case you're interested, it was quite similar to this.

Curious about what people felt about Club Mahindra, I turned to Google and was hit with scores of pages that painted Club Mahindra in the brightest shades (examples here, here & here). However, most of these sites/blogs seemed to have been created by the company/employees.

I scratched the surface and came across a lot of outbursts against Club Mahindra: tales of anger, disgruntlement, disenchantment and frustration, to name a few.

I scratched some more and discovered that Club Mahindra has been sponsoring blogger meets at their resorts. It looks like the initiative has paid off. The invited bloggers have sung praises in Club Mahindra's favour (examples here, here & here).

It looks like Club Mahindra has focussed heavily on acquiring a clean online reputation, especially since their IPO is due. The favourable blogs have actually managed to push down the complaints, as far as search engine pageranks are concerned. However, I still maintain (as I had written in an earlier post) that in today's connected world, people will eventually find out the what other customers feel about your brand. It would help to dedicate time and energy to become more customer-centric than trying to manufacture online reputation. Perhaps it could have saved Club Mahindra this unenviable distinction.

Thoughts are welcome in the Comments section.