Automated Marketing.org

In a recent post on CRM and social networking, I suggested that the growth of forums, blogs, wiki’s etc. will mean companies have to pay greater attention to the customer experience, because never before have customers had as much scope to broadcast their opinions, and never before have people been more inclined to listen and act on them. As an interesting case in point we saw Chav-gate this week where a holiday company sent an email marketing campaign suggesting its holidays were Chav-free (wikipedia definition of Chav here for non-UK readers). Unfortunately one of the recipients was offended and decided to blog about it. Anyway before long the incident had made the front page of the BBC news web-site. I’m not certain whether this represents good or bad publicity for the holiday company ultimately, but it does illustrate the impact a small number of upset customers can have.