Perception IS reality

“Perception is reality” – Lee Atwater

In the wake of the Boston marathon bombing and the online story frenzy that followed all companies should ask themselves: if event “X” happens, will the online media scene will report and spread news in an unbiased and sane manner or will we be forced to handle a cascade of mostly false news with no way to respond?

After the Boston marathon bombing quite a few stories began circulating around the web, some of them blatantly false. For example it was claimed that two 8 year old children competed in the marathon and were killed in the explosions, with accompanying pictures of the kids running in full marathon clothing. The small problem with the pictures? They were from a different marathon, and with a 30-second research everyone could have found that out, and yet the pictures were circulated for days and shared thousands of times.

How is all of this related to social CRM?

The same hurricane of false news and reports could affect companies and their products. For example Tesla Motors suffered a bad review in the New York Times that allegedly resulted in cost of 100$ million as mentioned in the linked article, what if the information provided in the article weren’t true? What’s the best way to prevent and react to those kind of issues? What are the tools that a company can use to push it’s own truth and make sure that perception is not going to work against them?

Tesla is leading the way, in fact Elon Musk, the founder of the company addressed the problem trough a blog on the webpage of the company. Using this new tool Tesla showcased how powerful a company reaction can be. Instead of just releasing a statement that would have been overlooked by the customers Tesla used all the tools in the box and, in the blog entry on their website, provided factual data to debunk the lies provided in the article. This wouldn’t have been possible without a correct preparation. The article wasn’t the first time they received a “bad review” in fact the world famous Topgear of BBC (a tv show about cars) aired a clip where they showed the problems related with the usage of an electric powered car. Back then Tesla didn’t expect a biased review and didn’t prepare to debunk eventual misstatements, but that was an hard learned lesson…..understanding the extreme importance to align reality with perception (reality being journalists review) they went to great lengths to equip the car with all the latest tracking and telemetric devices that later enabled to strongly defend themselves.

Just to prove how important is to get the facts right Tesla stock fell from $39.48 the day before the story was published to $37.04 after the story was published, a 6.2% decline that reduced $278 million from Tesla capitalization!

In the new CRM 2.0 era is extremely important for the companies to understand that the ability to understand and fiddle with customer perception is one of their strongest asset but, at the same time, it could be one of their worst nightmare.

For this reason is essential to learn how to prevent, correct and change in to favorable all possible unexpected event by leveraging all the crm tools in their possession.