Chris Graham
BLOG ASSIGNMENT: SOCIAL LISTENING
“Pet Party”
For my social listening, I selected petpartyco. This is an online business that makes custom socks that include photos submitted by client. I decided to analyze the feedback on petpartyco because I personally used their products as christmas gifts once I found them via instagram. Once I began to read comments on their instagram posts, I was a bit shocked on the wide variety of feedback.
With Pet Party, the custom pet socks better the customer by allowing them to have a new way to constantly be reminded of their pets and the happiness that follows.
When looking more in depth at the comments of Pet Party’s instagram, it was very back and forth and could leave the people interested in the product confused. Below I have attached screenshots of a select few comments I found within 1 minute of viewing the post. We can see some mixed feelings and have some customers excited and saying they had the custom socks delivered in 3 days, versus some customers having to wait over two weeks.
It is very apparent that Pet Party is using the cuteness factor of animals combined with having it be a personal pet to sell, as it can bring positivity to your day by seeing your own doggos face. Without a doubt this is a great idea and strives during gift giving seasons, so aside from what they are selling, I seem to notice a few possible flaws in customer service and communication side of things while promoting on social media.
With that being said, I feel the marketing challenge facing Pet Party is an overall lack of communication and consistency. The first thing that supports this can be seen in the screen shots from above, this is because we see that lack of communication to these individuals on shipping expectations must have occurred when checking out online, also that the shipping itself is an example of Pet Party being inconsistent. Another simple example we can take away from those screenshots, is how Pet Party did not reply to any of them via instagram. This concludes that communication lacked on website for shipping expectations, and lacked on instagram by ghosting paying customers!
I can confidently say that not replying to these customers was a bad idea. This is because not only will these people be left unsatisfied, but that on this post, there was under a 60 comments and would take a few minutes to reply to these paying customers. If I were the brand manager for Pet Party and I was faced with this issue, I would immediately make sure all customers are on the same page by providing very clear shipping and delivering expectations on website during and after checkout by getting customers email to send updates. Once I am done with main priority as traffic directly through sales on website, I would make sure to assign others or myself to constantly check comments on posts and give replies. I feel this is accomplishable because the instagram account only has 8,000 followers, making it not that time consuming or difficult to respond, especially if it helps spread positive word of our business.
This assignment is a real eye opener to the impact communication to audience has on a business. It shocks me because my experience was luckily very smooth with Pet Party, and I loved the products and assumed the same for others until I began to read the comments. This overall is a great way to remind me how providing a great first impression is crucial when it comes to trusting a business.