Who doesn't know the case of the Vodafone customer who, tired of waiting for an answer from an operator on the business support line, decided to join a forum? It happened on December 8, 2009. The individual used the username "Grankoala" and posed the question on the forum: "I called Vodafone's business support line 122 telegram data about a problem with my line. A lady told me to hold while they resolve my issue. I've been on hold for 50 minutes listening to the music. What do I do? Do I hang up or wait?" The discussion thread quickly began to grow. Until 27 hours later, on December 9, Grankoala announced: "I regret to inform you that at this very moment, 1:11 a.m., I HANGED UP WITH THE PHONE!!!"
The "anecdote" became an online reputation crisis, with more than 6,000 comments from outraged users, more than 5,000 comments on online news sites, appearances in more than 30 digital media outlets, the creation of a Facebook group, comments on radio and television, and inclusion in numerous case studies as analytical material.
A comment on a forum can go from being an innocuous comment to the seed of an online corporate communications crisis in just a few hours . Hence the importance of monitoring and understanding what is being said about the brand/company on these platforms. To make this easier, here are five free tools:
Boardreader .
Created in 2000 by a group of students at the University of Michigan, it's a comprehensive tool that searches not only forums but also comments on images and videos. Its advanced search system allows you to filter by language (very useful for avoiding "noise" in the results), date (up to a maximum of one year), and domain, sort results by relevance or time, and check which forums are the most active. It also offers graphs showing the daily frequency of forum comments about a given term over the past six months, and compares it with up to two other terms.
Case in point: The search "Inditex" yields 934 comments in the last three months, 645 of which are in Spanish, and the majority from stock market and investment forums. Its flagship brand, Zara, recorded no fewer than 50,832 posts in the same period, of which only about 1,600 are in Spanish... and the most relevant comments are related to the dismantling, a month ago, of textile workshops where minors worked in slavery-like conditions.