FreshNetworks Blog

People are talking about you? Everywhere? In public and in private? Asking questions you don’t know need answering and giving answers that may not be true.

Let’s consider one well-known brand of coffee shops. It has over 500 groups on Facebook in London alone, and Technorati lists 831 blogs specifically about is. A quick search on the web reveals:

• A Facebook group discussing whether or not a certain product is Kosher. A small but very active group of people discuss what they think about this - sharing and spreading a multitude of advice and rumours, many of which are probably not true. At one stage a member of the group takes it upon themselves to email the brand to get their views and the official response is published. Group members still don’t believe this.
• A blog which claims to reveal new details of product and service innovation – leaking them out before the chain would want them to be. The blog seems to be written by somebody who works for the brand but this is never confirmed and the validity of some of their claims is questioned.
• A set of YouTube videos that are mock adverts for the chain made by fans (and some by critics). What’s interesting about these is that the brand itself doesn’t do any video advertising, so when you search for the brand on any video site it’s these videos that come up.

In all of these examples what’s surprising is that the brand itself is not present – if they had been informing the Facebook group then false rumours wouldn’t spread. If they had allowed people to overtly blog or indeed controlled the release of information themselves they would know what was happening when. And if they could harness the powers and energies of all these people discussing their brand then that would be even more powerful.