We’ve all heard of it by now, the Consumer Protection Act or CPA for short, effective since the 1^st of April 2011. Finally the “little guys” have the power, to a degree, when buying goods and services. The act covers various consumer rights relating to buying goods and services; the return, repair and refunds thereof; fixed agreement terminations and a few others. The areas of the act that we will focus on that impacts on marketing, though, are: Right 2: the right to privacy, and Right 3: the right to fair and responsible marketing.

Gone are the days of telesales agents calling you at every conceivable hour of the day to sell you that Cellphone contract that you do not want or need. Also, you have the right to demand being removed from mailing lists if you receive spam text SMS’s that do not give you the option to opt out. This also pertains to all other forms of spam emails and other correspondence. This is certainly great news for the consumers, but how does this affect the marketers of all these goods and services? Well now there are fewer avenues to reach potential customers, but there is one avenue that many marketers are starting to rely on to reach an ever-growing online market.

The online population has exploded in the last ten years, with companies like Facebook having more users than all but 3 countries’ populations on earth and marketing budgets all over the world are moving over from the old traditional forms to the new age of marketing, online marketing. The biggest player on the online information/ search engine market is undoubtedly Google. Whenever there is something you want to know, buy or sell, Google can provide you a portal to literally Billions of websites, information and potential customers.

So what does this have to do with the CPA, well it comes down to two words: Permission Marketing. Permission marketing, the opposite is called interruption marketing, is when consumers give you “permission” to advertise and sell to them by clicking on adverts and websites and by searching for information or products. Thus they are coming to you for this info and thus the CPA places no restrictions on this form of marketing. Many large companies are relying heavily on their websites to sell their products and services and some companies do not even have physical offices anymore.

To conclude, the CPA has contributed heavily to the changing face of marketing in South Africa and marketers everywhere have had to adapt their strategies to accommodate this. Companies are spending millions each month advertising using Google and Facebook ads as well as optimizing their websites to rank high on search engines (SEO). The only question that remains is “Can you afford not to adapt your marketing strategy as well”?

So this is quite a statement. This might not be completely true but I know some companies that feel this way when they stumble upon a complaint about their products or services.

People have moved away from simply phoning up a company to complain about their products or services. Gone are the days of waiting in a phone queue for hours at end. Consumers are now going on-line to air their opinions about services and products.

There has been plenty of websites released that offer people a space to complain for the world to see. The problem with this is that these never disappear and your company has very little control over the opinions that are voiced.

So how can you manage your reputation on-line and stay one step ahead? As staying one step ahead in 2010 is our theme for this week we would like to let you in on a little secret. The tools are already available.

With web 2.0 changing the model of content generation from the corporation to the consumer, reputation management has become an increasingly more complicated subject. I would like to tell you the most effective way to manage your reputation, is by being proactive and opening up the communication channel.

People are just looking for somewhere to vent their frustrations. Consumers have been turning to the web as an outlet when they don’t find any answer by using traditional forms of communication i.e. phone and email. Now they are writing blog posts, tweeting and even building complete websites focused on bad service they receive from companies.

Lets approach this from a different perspective. You offer your clients a public website that allows them to air their complaints be it a twitter account, a company blog or a website that administrate your customer services on-line.

Consumers will rather turn to these to report their problems, as they know that these concerns are available in the public scene and as such addressed effectively because of this. This in turn then immediately provides your company with control over the situation again.

Micro blogging service Twitter has become one of these outlets and is easily and freely available to consumers. As consumers voice their thoughts, be it bad or good, you could be there to address it, proactively stomping out situations before they become problems.

Popular CRM software such as Salesforce.com even now help you to setup twitter customer services through their Service Cloud product. This allows you to track service request on several communication channels just like you would with your client relationship management software.

Reputation management has become fundamental to companies and as such you need to open up all forms of communication so that consumers can move from being “wimps”, from our company’s perspective, to active participants in our companies growth.

If you are interested in us helping you with a solution that will suite your company feel free to contact us.