UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 49Stopping the Share

Once you've created great products, services, or content, you don't need to do that much to get people to share it. It's really more about staying out of the way. Here are a few of the worst offenders for getting in the way of sharing.

Flattening Out Word of Mouth

Back in January 2013, BeautyAndFashionTech.com wrote the kind of review of Chi Flat Irons¹ that any product company would be jealous of. They loved the flat iron and gave it a rave review.

That really should be the end of a very short, boring story…it's not.

Rather than thank the site for the love, the parent company of Chi, Farouk Systems, turned around and sued the blog—for copyright infringement.

Here are just a couple reasons why this is ridiculous.

1. The review was entirely positive, unsolicited by the company, and free. A glowing, unbiased, free review—the gold standard for product companies online. Chi didn't even have to give the site a free flat iron. It's just bad business to try to stop people from saying—to other people and for free!—that they like your product. Companies work long and hard to have a product or service customers love and then to have those customers share their love with the world. Public relations and social media strategist, experts, and managers devote their days to making these things happen.

   Why do anything to get in the way of good reviews? There have been companies and products I previously loved for which I was ready to share stories about until the ...