The second promotion-related role of social media
is unique: customers can use it to communicate
with one another. In his book The New Influencers,
Gillin (2007) points out that ‘‘Conventional marketing
wisdom has long held that a dissatisfied customer
tells ten people. But that is out of date. In the new
age of social media, he or she has the tools to tell 10
million’’ (p. 4) consumers virtually overnight. Gillin
illustrates this potential power by recounting the
story of Vincent Ferrari, a blogger who posted an
audio recording of his encounter with an AOL customer
service representative. The representative’s
persistent attempts to convince Ferrari not to cancel
his account offended listeners’ sensibilities to
the extent that approximately 300,000 of them
requested to download the audio file. The story
went ‘‘viral’’ as it was picked up by thousands of
other bloggers and websites. It eventually drew the
attention of such mainstream media as The New
York Post, The New York Times, and NBC. It can be
presumed that AOL’s management was embarrassed,
to say the least.
In a sense, this second role of social media–—
enabling customers to talk to one another–—is an
extension of traditional word-of-mouth communication.
But as the Vincent Ferrari story illustrates, the
uniqueness lies in the magnitude of the communication.
Instead of telling a few friends, consumers
now have the ability to tell hundreds or thousands of
other people with a few keystrokes! The question for
managers becomes: ‘‘How can this power be harnessed
for the benefit of the organization?’’ While
companies cannot directly control consumer-toconsumer
messages, they do have the ability to
influence the conversations that consumers have
with one another. Methods for accomplishing this
are presented in section 4.