How and When to Respond to Conversations
During one of the early sessions from the Word of Mouth Marketing conference, Idil Kakim from Burson Marsteller asked the panelists whether companies needed to address every single comment/question that comes in on their blogs. The responses were diverse.
Jonathan Carson from NielsenBuzzmetrics said idea of having a conversation doesn’t scale; it’s more about participating in a culture of conversation.
Taking similar tone, Jim Nail from Cymfony said that if your blog generates a few comments, you should respond. However, when you get into the big numbers it becomes far more difficult. He suggests analyzing the common themes and then responding to them with a blog post or - and this last point was interesting - through traditional PR channels.
I am in Jim's corner. It's very hard to respond to every comment that comes into a blog from customers when the volume is high. However, the tricky part is that consumers may have the expectation that you will.
