About three years ago a customer of a cable company called customer service to send someone over to fix their cable modem. When the repairman showed up he had some trouble and he proceeded to call customer service for a tip or two. While on hold,(for about an hour) he fell asleep. The customer recorded this sleeping repairman on hold with his camcorder and placed it on youtube. The video was an immediate sensation, and copy cats appeared. This tapped into an anger, and with the power of the Internet, Comcast had to scramble to put out fires.
In Buzzmarketing, writer Mark Hughes says that people are 28 times more likely to tell others about a bad experience than a good one. Pre-net this might result in some bad karma, and maybe a small slice of lost sales. After all, word of mouth could spread, but it took time, effort and had to have that certain edge to tap into psyche of the public.
With the Internet this has all changed – things can spread in minutes not weeks.
On Saturday as everyone knows, the jocks at Penn National voted to not ride horses owned by Michael Gill. Immediately the buzz from the backstretch started. Text messages, chat board posts, tweets and more. The virus was unleashed. Quickly jumping on this was Ray Paulick of the Paulick Report.
His original story spawned 187 comments.
His next story had 135.
His next (this morning) has 50 or so and counting.
If you believe statistics that say only 5% of so comment on stories via the medium, that is a ton of interest in this story.
In addition, this story was quickly picked up by the regular media, has resulted in possibly 200 or 300 pages on chat boards, probably hundreds more comments via email. All in about 72 hours.
Ten or twenty years ago there were similar stories like this, but they had a tough time spreading quickly. Maybe an industry trade magazine would have it as a story in your mailbox a month later. You could not comment on the story, unless you write a letter to the editor to run a month ahead of that. Maybe there would be some sort of meeting if people we energized enough. The buzz would be muted, and it would probably all go away. Racing itself responded fairly slowly to any controversy back then, because that is the way they are built. They did not have to respond quickly.
Racing in 2010 is just like it was before – much of it is still behind closed doors. We have heard nary a peep from anyone inside racing about this, while customers and fellow horse owners are typing away. It makes for trouble, because when customers, participants, industry watchers, bloggers, websites and so on are living in a transparent world, and participating in the conversation, while racing is not, there is a disconnect. And those disconnects are not good for any business.
5 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Nice way to put this in real time context, Dean. Penn National (racing) needs to do what Comcast did: Hire a guy like Frank Eliason, the man behind @comcastcares who has changed the perception of the cable company through personal interaction and issue addressing on Twitter.
Hey Sid,
Comcast scores really well now on customer satisfaction because of that, as I am sure you know. A true success story.
I am not sure if it is because of no leadership or malaise or what, but racing seems very distant. For example, last year there was a harness race where a horse left the race course (taking a short cut), came back on, and won the race. He was left up. Bettors were justifiably wondering what happened and how he could be left up…….. resonse from racing? Virtual silence. Finally about four or five months after the incident, the racing commission addressed it. Four or five months is about four or five years in the Internet world.
D
Dean, nice post. Unfortunately unlike Comcast, racing hasn’t got someone who stands up and says “the buck stops with me” rather we rely on both a fractionated and factionalized response which invariably means situations like this are not handled well at all.
Dean, that’s outrageous! I just hope that new industry watchdog, former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah P, can address some of the malaise.
Dean,
The issues you raise would create deep analysis and careful planning in a sane environment or in a progressive business.
So what’s racing’s leading rag gonna do? Shrink to 20 pages?
Something like that.
Good luck to us all,
Frank