1. Social media and the internet have enabled people to exercise freedoms guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, like freedom of speech and the right to petition, on a mass scale.
2. This gives people powerful public platforms to provide non-anonymous feedback and complaints to businesses and organizations.
3. Services like Gripe allow users to publicly complain about issues and incidents, which are then shared on social media to pressure businesses to quickly resolve problems and earn public praise.
Goes back to 1776 and the founding of this country Back then we had 2 of our 5 rights under the 1 st ammendment. It wasn’t until 1979 with the birth of the PC and desktop publishing, then the internt and finally blogging around the turn of the century, where the masses finally got freedom of press. (Before that you needed to own presses and they were expensive). And even after that, Freedom of Assembly was not really availalble to the masses until FB in particular brought one more important piece of infrastruture in place with it’s “real name” requirement and it’s connect… So more recently, services like Quora and Gri.pe which I’ll talk to have been able to use to bring the right to Petition to the masses
-- You’re seeing the partial version : In Tunisia / Egypt, the right to assembly + petition are not yet fully embraced… but they are, online (useful, possible and therefore inevitable) - This is why you had the Egyptian government trying to shut down the internet as soon as the problems began… right to peacefully assemble is very powerful. - But these people don’t have a formal way to “petition” for their grievances yet… so, they have to physically hang out in a square until things change.
Cost Center for companies Could be ignored (not much impact) Marketing / Sales function is the revenue generator That deserves most of the attention
Consumers - No brainer and easy to understand why within a week of release we shot the number one app for “complaints” in the iTunes store and have stayed there. Merchants - Positive WOM is priceless and worth much more than all the Superbowl ads you could imagine. In fact in the internet age there isn’t a brand that does well if WOM about them sucks.