Why You Should Monitor Online Buzz About Your Company or Product?

Marketers and advertisers are always looking forward to create some buzz in the niche market. Companies are spending millions of Dollars to create a brand name in their niche.  But sometimes old stories come back to surface and may put havoc pressure on the present status of the company.

As the web is growing everyday with general people actively participating in different forums, publishing blogs or more importantly consuming daily news from different online sources, it is very important for companies to participate online or answer to public grievances and different odd situations to continue a positive brand exposure.

What happened earlier?

You had no direct ways (and less expensive) to understand actual public opinion about your company or your products. And even if there had been some small issues with your product in certain localities, it could hardly affect the overall presence of your business and brand name in other parts. This was a boon for some advertisers and marketers as they didn’t have to take any immediate steps and individual grievances were never documented or circulated across the user base. The cumulative affect was much less and needed enough time to travel across other territories to create a bigger impact.

When twitter launched search option, online marketers found a good solution to address public grievances as soon as they were raised. At least they got an option to understand the overall market response for a product and the brand name. Even if the marketer does not have enough resources to address all the quarries individually, they can answer the situation in their online platform.

However, the companies must continuously monitor market buzz regarding their product. Why?

Take a look at this article “False buzz pummels United Airlines” published by an online advertising and buzz marketing magazine. The chaotic situation occurred when South Florida Sun-Sentinel published a story on their Website pointing that United Airlines was filing for bankruptcy. Eventually, the story was picked up by Income Securities Advisors a Florida based investment newsletter and Bloomberg. So, what was the outcome?

The story got circulated faster than some good news and United Airline’s stock fell down from $12.30 to $9.30 within five days. This was undoubtedly a huge loss for the company. The irony of the situation is that the company was not filing for bankruptcy. The story spread when Sun-Sentinel actually republished an old Chicago Tribune story from 2002 only by mistake.

And it did not affect the United Airlines alone. Almost all the airlines companies experienced the drop. The good news is that the market came back to normal position when people realized that the story was not real.

So, what do you think? Is it important to monitor the online buzz?